selves with inquiry into the nature of consciousness have a strongly developed intellectual interest; this makes it easy for them to postulate a universal concern in know¬ ing objects as the very essence of mind. These persons have rectitude of cognitive bent, acquired through scien¬ tific training; and they with ready benevolence, confer similar rectitude upon perception universally. Then when the existence of error, mistake, dreams, hallucina¬ tions, etc. is recognized, these things are treated as devia¬ tions and exceptions from the normal, to be accounted for by the introduction of complicating factors.
The problem and its solution thus become essentially dialectical. For empirical facts indicate that not error but truth is the exception; the thing to be accounted for, and that the attainment of truth is the outcome of the development of complex and elaborate methods of search¬ ing, methods that while congenial to some men in some respects, in many respects go against the human grain, so that they are adopted only after long discipline in a school of hard knocks. Even to put the matter in terms of proportion of erroneous and true perceptions, is to fail to see the chief objection to the theory. For it postu¬ lates the primarily cognitive character of awareness or perception. Empirically, however, the characteristic thing about perceptions in their natural estate, apart from subjection to an art of knowing, is their irrelevance to both truth and error; they exist for the most part in another dimension, whose nature may be suggested by reference to imagination, fancy, reverie, affection, love and hate, desire, happiness and misery. This fact, more than the error-problem, proves the artificial character of the spectator, search-light, notion of consciousness.
EXISTENCE AND IDEAS Empirical evidence in support of the proposition that consciousness of meanings denotes redirection of mean¬ ings (which are always ultimately meanings of events) is supplied by obvious facts of attention and interest on one side, and the working of established and assured habits on the other. The familiar does not consciously appear, save in an unexpected, novel, situation, where the familiar presents itself in a new light and is therefore not wholly familiar. Our deepest-seated habits are precisely those of which we have least awareness. When they operate in a situation to which they are not accustomed, in an unusual situation, a new adjustment is required. Hence there is shock, and an accompanying perception of dis¬ solving and reforming meaning. Attention is most alert and stretched, when, because of unusual situations, there is great concern about the issue, together with suspense as to what it will be. We are engaged at once in taking in what is happening and looking ahead to what has not yet happened. As far as we can count upon the contempo¬ rary conditions and upon their outcome, focalization of meaning is absent. That which is taken to be involved in any event, in every issue, no matter what, we are not aware of. If we consider the entire field from bright focus through the fore-conscious, the “fringe,” to what is dim, sub-conscious “feeling,” the focus corresponds to the point of imminent need, of urgency; the “fringe” corresponds to things that just have been reacted to or that will soon require to be looked after, while the remote outlying field corresponds to what does not have to be modified, and which may be dependably counted upon in dealing with imminent need.
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE Hence the proverbial disparity between things in the scale of consciousness and in the scale of consequences is the most conclusive refutation of subjective idealism. The power of a momentary annoyance or flitting amuse¬ ment to distract a personage from an enduringly serious question is a familiar theme of comedy; a glass of wine or the whine of a mosquito may exclude issues of life and death. Any trivial thing may swell and swell, if it bothers us. To like effect are the standing complaints of moralists that men sacrifice the great good to the lesser, if the latter be close at hand; and their proclamation that reason and freedom are only found when the near-by and the remote good are weighed with equal balance. Trag¬ edy gives the same testimony. While doom impends the tragic hero fatally pursues his way, unheeding of the web closing in upon him, obvious to all others, and oblivious of what should be done to avert destructive destiny.
The immediately precarious, the point of greatest im¬ mediate need, defines the apex of consciousness, its intense or focal mode. And this is the point of re-direction, of re-adaptation, re- organization. Hence the aptness of James’s comparison of the course of consciousness to a stream, in spite of its intermittent character— a fact empirically recognized in his intimation of its rhythmic waxings and wanings —; of his insistence that only an object, not a concrete consciousness which is had twice, or which remains the same; of his analogy of focus and fringe; of his statement of its movements as a series of perchings and flights, of substantial and transitive phases; formean- ings are condensed at the focus of imminent re-direction only to disappear as organization is effected, and yield place to another point of stress and weakness.
EXISTENCE AND IDEAS Empirical confirmation of this conception of conscious¬ ness is found in the extreme instability of every per¬ ceived object; the impossibility of excluding rapid and subtle change, except at the cost of inducing hypnotic sleep; the passage from being wide awake, awake, drowsy, dreaming and fast asleep, according as an organism is actively partaking, or abstaining from par¬ taking, in the course of events. All that goes by the name of “relativity” of consciousness is to precisely the same effect, including the Weberian principle; perceived changes are those which require a redirection of adaptive behavior. A prior adaptation constitutes a threshold (better called a platform or plateau); what is consciously noted is alteration of one plateau; re- adjustment to an¬ other. Similar events may mean cold at one time or place and warmth at another, depending upon the direc¬ tion of organic re-adaptation. Even a tooth-ache is unstable in consciousness for it is notoriously a matter of throbs, pulsations, palpitations, waxings and wanings of intensity, of organic protests and temporary deviations, and of enforced returns — of flights and perchings. The “tooth-ache” which does not change is not the perceived tooth-ache, but the cognitive object, the unperceived tooth to which the sequence of all changes is referred.
Confirmation of the hypothesis is found in the fact that wherever perceptual awareness occurs, there is a “mo¬ ment” of hesitation; there are scruples, reservations, in complete overt action. It seems quite probable that men of the executive type are those of the least subtle and variegated perceptual field; of the lowest degree of con¬ sciousness. having the steepest threshold to be crossed in order to induce a state of awareness. We have to EXPERIENCE AND NATURE “stop and think,” and we do not stop unless there is interference. The flood of action at high tide overrides all but the most considerable obstructions. It flows too forcibly and rapidly in one direction to be checked; without inhibition there are no hesitations, crises, alter¬ natives, need of re-direction. Overt action is an enstate- ment of established organic-environmental integrations. As long as these can maintain themselves, they do so; there is then no opportunity for transforming meaning into idea. In completely integrated function there is no room for distinction between things signifying and things signified. Only when behavior is divided within itself, do some of its factors have a subject-matter which stands for present tendencies and for their requirements or indi¬ cations and implications, while others factors stand for absent and remote objects which, in unifying and organiz¬ ing activity, complete the meaning of what is given at hand. The readier a response, the less consciousness, meaning, thinking it permits; division introduces mental confusion, but also, in need for redirection, opportunity for observation, recollection, anticipation.
There is then an empirical truth in the common opposi¬ tion between theory and practice, between the contem¬ plative, reflective type and the executive type, the “go- getter,” the kind that” “gets things done.” Itis.however. a contrast between two modes of practice. One is the pushing, slam-bang, act-first and think-afterwardsirinfle, to which events mav yield as they give wav to anv strong force. The other mode is wary, observant, sensitive to. slight hints and intimations; perhaps intriguing, timid jn public and ruthless in concealed action; perhaps over-cautious and inhibited, unduly subject to scrunles.
EXISTENCE AND IDEAS hesitancies, an ineffective Hamlet in performance; or per¬ haps achieving a balance between immediately urgent demands and remoter consequences, consistent and cumulative in action. In the latter case, there develops a field of perception, rich in hues and subtle in shades of meaning. In the degree in which this occurs, overt action is subordinated to the contribution it renders to sustaining and developing the scope of the conscious field. One lives on a conscious plane; thought guides activity, and perception is its reward. Action is not suppressed but is moderated. Like the scientific experi¬ menter, one acts not just to act, nor rashly, nor automati- cally, but with a consciousness of purpose and for the sake of learning. Intellectual hesitations and reserva¬ tions are used to expand and enrich the field of percep¬ tion, by means of rendering activity more delicate, and discriminatingly adapted.
The notion that highly thoughtful persons are incom¬ petent in action has its proper corrective in another atti¬ tude of belief which is expressed in such words as these: “No one can make you see this point; but unless you do see it, you won’t change your conduct; if you do get the point you will act differently.” The first notion, that thought paralyzes, refers to action in gross, the second re¬ lates to change in quality of action. Carry to an extreme the experiences indicated by the first proposition, and the result is the so-called automaton or epiphenomenal theory of consciousness; perception is an idle and superficial at¬ tachment to a mechanical play of energies. Carry the experiences involved in the other saying to an extreme, and you have the doctrine of the original creativeness of consciousness; it makes objects what they are.
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE Empirically the situation stands about like this: The use or intent of instruction, advice, admonition, and honest dialectic is to bring to awareness meanings hither¬ to unperceived, thereby constituting their ideas. The entanglements, misunderstandings and compromised un¬ derstandings of life are a sufficient commentary on the difficulties in the way of realizing this intent. But experi¬ ence demonstrates that as far as it is accomplished, con¬ duct is actually changed; to get a new meaning is per¬ force to be in a new attitude. This does not indicate that consciousness or perception is an entity which makes the difference. What follows is that perception or con¬ sciousness is, literally, the difference in process of making. Instruction and reproof that are not an idle flogging of the air involve an art of re-directing activity: given this redirection and there is emergence of change in meanings, or perception. There is here no question of priority or causal sequence; intentional change in direction of events is transforming change in the meaning of those events. We have at present little or next to no controlled art of securing that redirection of behavior which constitutes adequate perception or consciousness. That is, we have little or no art of education in the fundamentals, namely in the management of the organic attitudes which color the qualities of our conscious objects and acts.
As long as our chief psycho-physical coordinations are formed blindly and in the dark during infancy and early childhood, they are accidental adjustments to the pressure of other persons and of circumstances which act upon us. They do not then take into account the consequence of these activities upon formation of habits and habitua- tions. Hence the connection between consciousness and EXISTENCE AND IDEAS action is precarious, and its possession a doubtful boon as compared with the efficacy of instinct — or structure — in lower animals. Energy is wasteful and misdirected; in the outcome we effect the opposite of what we intended. Consciousness is desultory and casual. Only when organic activity achieves a conscious plane shall we be adequately aware of what we are about. As long as our own fundamental psycho-physical attitudes in dealing with external things are subconscious, our conscious atten¬ tion going only to the relations of external things, so long will our perception of the external situations be subject at its root to perversion and vitiation. This state of affairs is the source of that apparent disconnection be¬ tween consciousness and action which strikes us when we begin to reflect. The connecting links between the two are in our own attitudes; while they remain unper¬ ceived, consciousness and behavior must appear to be independent of each other. Hence there will be empirical reason for isolating consciousness from natural events. When so isolated, some persons will assert that conscious¬ ness is a slavish and capricious shadow of things and others will proclaim that it is their rightful creator and master. Assertions, like those of this discussion, that consciousness is their recognized meaning when they are undergoing purposeful re-direction by means of organic activity will seem to lack full empirical evidence.
It remains to note and deal with two difficulties that have quite probably troubled the reader. In the first place, the discussion has explicitly gone on the basis that what is perceived are meanings, rather than just events or existences. In this respect, the view presented agrees with classic teaching, according to which perception, EXPERIENCE AND NATURE apprehension, lays hold of form, not of matter. I believe this view properly understood is inherently sound; the error in the classic theory lies in its accompanying assump¬ tion that all perceptions are intrinsically cognitive. In the second place, the identification of consciousness with perceptive awareness runs counter to the verbal usage of recent psychology and philosophy which limits perception to apprehension (usually valid) of contemporaneously occurring events in “real” space. The latter issue how¬ ever is not just a matter of propriety of language — about which it would be absurd to argue. It involves the conviction that perception of real things now exist¬ ing differs inherently from other modes of consciousness, such as emotion, thinking, remembering, fancy and imagi¬ nation. For this conviction, it must be explicitly noted, is contradicted by the conception which has been stated. According to the latter every mode of awareness — as distinct from “feeling” — in its immediate existence is exactly the same sort of thing, namely a remaking of meanings of events. The difference, it is implied, between awareness of present and “real” things and of absent and unreal is extrinsic, not intrinsic to a consciousness. The sequel will reveal that these two points are intimately connected with each other.
When it is denied that we are conscious of events as such it is not meant that we are not aware of objects. Objects are precisely what we are aware of. For objects are events with meanings; tables, the milky way, chairs, stars, cats, dogs, electrons, ghosts, centaurs, historic epochs and all the infinitely multifarious subject-matter of discourse designable by common nouns, verbs and their qualifiers. So intimate is the connection of meanings EXISTENCE AND IDEAS with consciousness that there is no great difficulty in resolving “consciousness,” as a recent original and ingenious thinker has done, into knots, intersections or complexes of universals.2 Serious difficulty sets in however when events are resolved into such combinations. The matter is referred to here not to be argued; but to indicate that a “realist” has gone even further than the theory now presented goes in identifying the subject-matter of which there is aware¬ ness with meanings, or at least with universals which, as simple subject-matter, colors, sounds, etc., and com¬ plex, plants, animals, atoms, etc., are precisely the same as meanings. To cause existences in their particularity to disappear into combinations of universals is at least an extreme measure. And the present thesis sticks to the common-sense belief that universals, relations, meanings, are of and about existences, not their exhaustive ingredi¬ ents. The same existential events are capable of an infinite number of meanings. Thus an existence identified as “paper,” because the meaning upper¬ most at the moment is “something to be written upon,” has as many other explicit meanings as it has important consequences recognized in the various connective interactions into which it enters. Since possibilities of conjunction are endless, and since the consequences of any of them may at some time be significant, its potential meanings are endless. It signi¬ fies something to start a fire with; something like snow; made of wood-pulp; manufactured for profit; property in the legal sense; a definite combination illustrative of cer¬ tain principles of chemical science; an article the inven- 2 Holt, The Concept of Consciousness.
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE tion of which has made a tremendous difference in human history, and so on indefinitely. There is no conceivable universe of discourse in which the thing may not figure, having in each its own characteristic meaning. And if we say that after all it is “paper” which has all these di 'erent meanings, we are at bottom but asserting that all the different meanings have a common existential reference, converging to the same event. We are virtually asserting t iat the existence whose usual, standardized meaning in discourse is paper, also has a multitude of other meanings; we are saying in effect that its existence is not exhausted in its being paper, although paper is its ordinary meaning for human intercourse.
Ghosts, centaurs, tribal gods, Helen of Troy and Ophelia of Denmark are as much the meanings of events as are flesh and blood, horses, Florence Nightingale and Madam Curie. This statement does not mark a dis¬ covery; it enunciates a tautology. It seems questionable only when its significance is altered; when it is taken to denote that, because they are all meanings of events, they all are the same kind of meaning with respect to validity of reference. Because perception of a ghost does not signify a subtle, intangible form, filling space as it moves about, it does not follow that it may not signify some other existential happening like disordered nerves; a religious animistic tradition; or, as in the play of Hamlet, that it may not signify an enhancement of the meaning of a moving state of affairs. The existential events that form a drama have their own characteristic meanings, which are not the less meanings of those events because their import is dramatic, not authentically cognitive. So when men gather in secret to plot a conspiracy, their EXISTENCE AND IDEAS plans are not the less meanings of certain events because they have not been already carried out; and they remain meanings of events even if the conspiracy comes to naught.
The proposition that the perception of a horse is objec¬ tively valid and that of a centaur fanciful and mythical does not denote that one is a meaning of natural events and the other is not. It denotes that they are meanings referable to different natural events, and that confused and harmful consequences result from attributing them to the same events. The idea that the consciousness of a horse as now present and of a centaur differ as percep¬ tions, or states of awareness, is an illustration of the harm wrought by introspective psychology, which, here as elsewhere, treats relationships of objects as if they were inherent qualities of an immediate subject-matter, ignor¬ ing the fact that causal relationships to unperceived things are involved. The matter of the cognitive validity of the horse-perception and the cognitive invalidity of the cen¬ taur-perception is not an affair of intrinsic difference in the two perceptions, which inspection of the two states of awareness as such can ever bring to light; it is a causal matter, brought to light as we investigate the causal antecedents and consequents of the events having the meanings.
In other words, the difference between assertion of a perception, belief in it, and merely having it is an extrinsic difference; the belief, assertion, cognitive reference is something additive, never merely immediate. Genuinely to believe the centaur-meaning is to assert that events characterized by it interact in certain ways with other now unperceived events. Since belief that centaur has the same kind of objective meaning as has horse denotes EXPERIENCE AND NATURE expectation of like efficacies and consequences, the differ¬ ence of validity between them is extrinsic. It is capable of being revealed only by the results of acting upon them. The awareness of centaur meaning is fanciful not simply because part of its conditions lie within the organism; part of the conditions of any perception, valid as well as invalid, scientific as well as esthetic, lie within the organ¬ ism. Nor is it fanciful, simply because it is supposed not to have adequate existential antecedents. Natural conditions, physiological, physical and social, may be specified in one case as in the other. But since the con¬ ditions in the two cases are different, consequences are bound to be different. Knowing, believing, involves something additive and extrinsic to having a meaning.
No knowledge is ever merely immediate. The proposi¬ tion that the perception of a horse is valid and that a centaur is fanciful or hallucinatory, does not denote that there are two modes of awareness, differing intrinsically from each other. It denotes something with respect to causation, namely, that while both have their adequate antecedent conditions, the specific causal conditions are ascertained to be different in the two cases. Plence it denotes something with respect to consequences, namely, that action upon the respective meanings will bring to light (to apparency or awareness) such different kinds of consequences that we should use the two meanings in very different ways. Both acts and consequences lie outside the primary perceptions; both have to be dili¬ gently sought for and tested. Since conditions in the two cases are different, they operate differently. That is, they belong to different histories, and the matter of the history to which a given thing belongs is just the matter EXISTENCE AND IDEAS EXISTENCE AND IDEAS with which knowledge is concerned. The conscious or perceived affair is itself a consequence of antecedent con¬ ditions. But were this conscious or apparent (evident, focal) consequence the only consequence of the conditions, if there were not other as yet unapparent consequences, we should have absolutely no way to tell in what sequence of events a perception belongs, and hence absolutely no way of determining its validity or cognitive standing. It is because conditions which generate the perception of a horse have other and different consequences than the perception (and similarly of those which generate the idea of the centaur), that it is possible to make a distinction between the value in knowledge of the two ideas. By discovering the different sequential affairs to which they respectively belong we can differentiate their import for knowledge. Failure to recognize this fact is the ulti¬ mate condemnation, it may be remarked in passing, of idealistic theories of knowledge, which identify it with im¬ mediate consciousness. If an all-inclusive consciousness were to exist, it would be a piece of esthetic scenery, interesting or tedious as the case might be, but having no conceivable cognitive standing.
That a perception is cognitive means, accordingly, that it is used; it is treated as a sign of conditions that impli¬ cate other as yet unperceived consequences in addition to the perception itself. That a perception is truly cognitive means that its active use or treatment is followed by consequences which fit appropriately into the other con¬ sequences which follow independently of its being per¬ ceived. To discover that a perception or an idea is cognitively invalid is to find that the consequences which follow from acting upon it entangle and confuse the other EXPERIENCE AND NATURE consequences which follow from the causes of the percep¬ tion, instead of integrating or coordinating harmoniously with them. The special technique of scientific inquiry may be defined as consisting of procedures which make it pos¬ sible to perceive the eventual agreement or disagreement of the two sets of consequences. For experience proves that it is possible for great disparity between them to exist, and yet the conflict not be perceived or else be explained away as of no importance.