Common-sense has no great occasion to distinguish between bare events and objects; objects being events- with-meanings. Events are present and operative any¬ way; what concerns us is their meanings expressed in expectations, beliefs, inferences, regarding their potentiali¬ ties. The nearest approach that occurs in ordinary life to making the distinction is when there occurs some brute, dumb shock, which we are constrained to interpret, to assign meaning to, that is, to convert into an object. Such situations supply direct empirical evidence of the difference between events and objects; but common-sense does not need to formulate the difference as a distinction. Events have effects or consequences anyway; and since meaning is awareness of these consequences before they actually occur, reflective inquiry which converts an event into an object is the same thing as finding out a meaning which the event already possesses by imputation. It is the essence of common sense, one might say, to treat potentialities as given actualities; since its interest is universally practical, bent upon fruitage, there is no need to note its bent in any particular case. The eventual outcome is for it the “reality” of the present situation.
EXISTENCE AND IDEAS But not so with philosophic discourse. Philosophy must explicitly note that the business of reflection is to take events which brutely occur and brutely affect us, to convert them into'objects by means of inference as to their probable consequences. These are the meanings imputed to the events under consideration. Otherwise philosophy finds itself in a hopeless impasse. For, apart from making a distinction between events and objects, it has no way of differentiating cognitive from esthetic and literary mean¬ ings, and within cognitive meanings it has no way of distinguishing the valid from the invalid. The outcome of failure in this respect is exemplified in those discussions which find an inherent and generic cognitive problem in the occurrence of dreams, reveries and hallucinations, a problem other than the scientific one of ascertaining their antecedents and effects. For if intrinsic cognitive intent is ascribed to all perceptions, or forms of awareness, which are alleged to pick out a “reality” to which they refer as an image or sign, dreams, etc., have to be squared to this assumption. Draw the distinction between events and objects, and dream-objects are just what they are, events with one kind of meaning, while scientific-objects are just what they are, events with another kind of meaning, a kind that involves an extrinsic and additive function not contained in dream-objects.
In formulating the distinction between existences and objects of reference, whether cognitive, esthetic or moral, philosophy does not exact that violent break with com¬ mon sense which is found in the assertion of idealism that events themselves are composed of meanings. Nor does it involve that break with common sense found in episte¬ mological realism, with its assertion of a direct dealing EXPERIENCE AND NATURE of mind with naked existences unclothed by the inter¬ vention of meanings. Philosophy has only to state, to make explicit, the difference between events which are challenges to thought and events which have met the challenge and hence possess meaning. It has only to note that bare occurrence in the way of having, being, or undergoing is the provocation and invitation to thought — seeking and finding unapparent connections, so that think¬ ing terminates when an object is present: namely, when a challenging event is endowed with stable meanings through relationship to something extrinsic but connected.
There is nothing new in the facts contained in this state¬ ment. It was an axiom of the classic theory that form, not matter, is the object of knowledge. And many other theories, in spite of the violence with which they nominally protest against the statement that existences as such are not the objects of knowledge, contain the essential facts, though in an incredible form. It is straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel to balk at the proposition that we mentally are concerned with events in their meanings and not in themselves, and at the same time to welcome the proposition that the immediate objects of all conscious¬ ness are sensations and complexes of sensations, termed images or ideas. For if by sensations (or by sensa) is meant not mere shocks in feeling, but something qualita¬ tive and capable of objective reference, then sensations are but one class of meanings. They are a class of mean¬ ings which embody the mature results of elaborate experi¬ mental inquiry in tracing out causal dependencies and rela¬ tionships. This inquiry depends upon prior possession of a system of meanings, physical theories of light, sound, etc., and of knowledge of nervous structures and functions.
EXISTENCE AND IDEAS EXISTENCE AND IDEAS The alleged primacy of sensory meanings is mythical. They are primary only in logical status; they are primary as tests and confirmation of inferences concerning matters of fact, not as historic originals. For, while it is not usu¬ ally needful to carry the check or test of theoretical calcu¬ lations to the point of irreducible sensa, colors, sounds, etc., these sensa form a limit approached in careful analy¬ tic certifications, and upon critical occasions it is neces¬ sary to touch the limit. The transformation of these ulterior checking meanings into existential primary data is but another example of domination by interest in results and fruits, plus the fallacy which converts a functional office into an antecedent existence. Sensa are the class of irreducible meanings which are employed in verifying and correcting other meanings. We actually set out with much coarser and more inclusive meanings and not till we have met with failure from their use do we even set out to discover those ultimate and harder meanings which are sensory in character.
The theory that awareness is intrinsically possessed of cognitive reference and intent is Protean in the forms it has assumed in the history of thought. One of these forms, that knowledge is recognition, is worth special attention. The idea that the act of knowing is always one of recognizing or noting is certain to lead the mind astray; dialectically, it breaks upon the impos¬ sibility entailed of instituting an initial act of know¬ ing; it commits its holder to a Platonic prior intuition in the realm of eternity. It is easy to see, however, how the idea suggested itself and gained credence. Recognition, identified and distinguished meaning, is an indispensable condition of effective experience. It is a prerequisite of EXPERIENCE AND NATURE successful practise; except in so far as the situation in which we are to act is distinguished as having a notable character, behavior is hopelessly at a loss. It is a pre¬ requisite to an act of knowing; for without possession of a recognized meaning, there is nothing to know with; there is no indication of the direction inquiry has to take, or of the universe within which inquiry falls. But, recogni¬ tion is not cognition. It is what the word implicitly conveys; re-cognition; not in the sense that an act of cognizing is repeated, but in the sense that there is a re¬ minder of the meaning in which a former experience terminated, and which may be used as an acceptable tool in further activities.
Most theories of knowing which define a knowledge as an immediate noting seem at bottom to rest upon a con¬ fusion of widely differing acts: one that of taking cogni¬ zance, which means to pay heed to the apparent in terms of non-apparent consequences; and the other that of being re-minded of something previously known, which is then used in the act of true, inferential, cognition. Recognition is re-instatement of a meaning vouched for in some other situation, plus a sense of familiarity, of immediate greet¬ ing of welcome or aversion. It is exemplified in the experience of revisiting the scenes of childhood, with the emotional responses which familiar scenes evoke; it is found in the acknowledgements of the thoroughly practi¬ cal man, who deferentially notes a character of existence as something which, as a practical man, he must take into account in planning his conduct. Recognition is a nod, either of voluntary piety or of coerced respect, not a knowing.
EXISTENCE AND IDEAS There is another theory which makes “acquaintance” the primary mode of knowledge, and which treats acquaintance-knowledge as wholly immediate. Ac¬ quaintance is empirically distinguished from knowing about a thing, and from knowing that a thing is thus and so. It is genuinely cognitive. But it has its distinctive features because it involves something more than bare presence of an identified meaning; it involves expectancy which is an extrinsic reference; it involves a judgment as to what the object of acquaintance will do in connec¬ tion with other events. To be acquainted with a man is at least to “know him by sight” as we truly say; it is to use- a meaning conditioned by present vision to form a supposition about something not seen: how the man will behave under other circumstances than those of just being seen. To be acquainted with a man is to forecast his general life of conduct; it is to have insight into character. And insight, as distinct from sight, means that sight is employed to form inferences regarding what is not seen. It passes beyond apparition of meaning. The difference between acquaintance and “knowing about” or “knowing that” is genuine, but it is not a differ¬ ence between two kinds of knowledge, one immediate and the other mediate. The difference is an affair of accom¬ paniments, contexts and modes of response. The greater intimacy and directness that marks acquaintance is practical and emotional not logical. To be acquainted with anything is to have the kind of expectancy of its consequences which constitutes an immediate readiness to act, an adequate preparatory adjustment to whatever the thing in question may do. To know about it is to have a kind of knowledge which does not pass into direct response EXPERIENCE AND NATURE until some further term has been supplied. Direct readi¬ ness to act involves a sense of community; postponed readiness a sense of aloofness. Where there is acquaint¬ ance, there is an immediate emotion of participation in the situations in which the object of acquaintance en¬ gages, sympathetic or antipathetic according as readiness takes the form of a disposition to favor or to hinder. Knowledge about a historic or literary figure passes into acquaintance when one arrives at a point of imaginative foresight of his prospective conduct and dramatically shares in it. Knowledge that the earth is round becomes acquaintance when, in some juncture of experience, the meaning comes home to us, as we say, or we get a “realiz¬ ing sense” of it. Acquaintance, then, instead of being a mode of knowledge prior to knowledge about and know¬ ledge that, marks a later stage in which the latter attain full sense and efficacy.
It follows that theories which identify knowledge with acquaintance, recognition, definition and classification give evidence, all the better for being wholly unintended, that we know not just events but events-with-meanings. To assert that knowledge is classification is to assert in effect that kind, character, has overlaid and over ridden bare occurrence and existence. To say that to know is to define is to recognize that wherever there is knowledge there is explicitly present a universal. To hold that cognition is recognition to concede that likeness, a rela¬ tion, rather than existence, is central. And to be ac¬ quainted with anything is to be aware what it is like, in what sort of ways it is likely to behave. These features, character, kind, sort, universal, likeness, fall within the universe of meaning. Hence the theories which make EXISTENCE AND IDEAS EXISTENCE AND IDEAS them constitutive of knowledge acknowledge that having meanings is a prerequisite for knowing. This prerequisite, being universally required, has loomed so large that thinkers have been led to slur over the concrete differential quality of knowledge — a particular act of taking, using, responding to, the meanings involved. That curious piece of traditional “analytic” psychology in accordance with which all knowing is a fusion or association of sensation with images is more testimony in the same direction; “associated imagery” being a round about equivalent of events with meaning.
Finally, the notion that knowledge is contemplation is likewise accounted for. To contemplate is con¬ sciously to possess meanings; to behold them with relish; to view them so absorbingly as to revel in them. It is a name for the perception of significant characters, plus an emphatic allusion to an accompanying esthetic emotion. Hypotheses which, like the one advanced in this book and chapter, hold that no knowing takes place without an overt act of taking and employing things on the basis of their meanings, have been attacked as over¬ devoted to keeping busy; as ignoring the place and charm of contemplation. Well, contemplation assuredly has a place. But when it is ultimate, and is a fruition, knowing has stepped out of the picture; the vision is esthetic. This may be better than knowing; but its being better is no reason for mixing different things and attributing to knowledge characters belonging to an esthetic object. Omit the esthetic phase, the absorbing charm of contem¬ plation, and what remains for a theory of knowledge is that meanings must be had before they can be used as means of bringing to apparition meanings now obscure and hidden.
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE If I were allowed to call to the witness stand but one historic theory to give testimony to prove that while there is no knowing without perception of meaning, yet that having meanings and rolling them over as sweet mor¬ sels under the tongue are not knowing, I should summon the venerable doctrine that knowledge is contemplation.
Another difficulty involved in the theory was men¬ tioned; a difficulty contained in the fact that recent theo¬ ries have limited the signification of perception. In its older usage, it designated any awareness, any “seeing” whether of objects, ideas, principles, conclusions or what¬ ever. In recent literature it is usually restricted to ‘ ‘sense- perception.” There can be no quarrel about the meaning of words except a lexicographical quarrel. The issue at stake concerns then not the appropriate use of a word; it concerns certain matters of fact which are implied or usually associated with the present restricted usage. These implications are two: First, there exists a mode of consciousness or awareness which is original, primitive, simple, and which refers immediately and intrinsically to things in space external to the organism at the time of perception. Secondly, this reference is originally, and ex proprio motu, cognitive. Now as against these implica¬ tions, the theory which has been advanced asserts that awareness in the form of auditory and visual perception is, whenever it is cognitive, just as much a matter of infer¬ ential judgment, an instance of a way of taking and using meanings, as is any proposition found in the science of physics.
In its general features, argument as to this point is to the same effect as that of the point just discussed. But we may avoid repetition and introduce greater speci- EXISTENCE AND IDEAS fication by confining ourselves to the factual traits charac¬ teristic of perceptions of present objects in space; showing that these, when they are cognitive, are highly selected and artful instances of awareness, not primitive and innocent. The current theory begins with a distinction between peripherally initiated and centrally initiated awareness. Peripheral initiation is the defining mark of such operations as are designated “perceptions.” But awarenesses do not come to us labelled “I am caused by an event initiated on the surface of the body by other bodies”; and “I on the contrary originate in an intra- organic event only indirectly connected with surface- changes.” The distinction is one made by analytic and classifying thought. This fact is enough to place in doubt the notion that some modes of consciousness are originally and intrinsically “sense-perception.”
Moreover, there is no absolute separation between the skin and the interior of the body. No sooner is the dis¬ tinction drawn than it has to be qualified. As a matter of fact there is no such thing as an exclusively peripherally initiated nervous event. Internal conditions, those of hunger, blood-circulation, endocrine functions, persist¬ ences of prior activities, pre-existent opened and blocked neuronic connections, together with a multitude of other intra-organic factors enter into the determination of a peripheral occurrence. And after the peripheral excita¬ tion has taken place, its subsequent career is not self- determined, but is affected by literally everything going on within the organism. It is pure fiction that a “sensa¬ tion”, or peripheral excitation, or stimulus, travels undis¬ turbed in solitary state in its own coach-and-four to enter the brain or consciousness in its purity. A particular EXPERIENCE AND NATURE excitation is but one of an avalanche of contemporane¬ ously occurring excitations, peripheral and from proprio¬ ceptors; each has to compete with others, to make terms with them; what happens is an integration of complex forces.
It requires therefore a highly technical apparatus of science to discriminate the exact place and nature of a peripheral stimulation, and to trace its normal course to just the junction point where it becomes effective for redirection of activity and thus capable of perception. “Peripheral origin” marks an interpretation of events, a discrimination scientifically valid and important, but no more an original datum than is the spectrum of Betelgeuse. The same thesis holds good, of course, of the “conscious¬ ness” corresponding to the centrally initiated processes. To suppose that there are inherently marked off different forms of awareness corresponding to the distinction arrived at by technical analysis is as flagrant a case of hypostatizing as can be found. The theory that certain kinds or forms of consciousness intrinsically have an intellectual or cognitive reference to things present in space is merely the traditional theory that knowledge is an immediate grasp of Being, clothed in the terminology of recent physiology. While it is offered as if it were estab¬ lished by physiological and psychological research, in reality it presents an intellectual hold-over, a notion picked up from early teachings which have not been subjected to any critical examination; physiology and psychology merely afford a vocabulary with which to deck out an unconscionable survival.
Reference to peripheral stimulation of eye or ear or skin or nose is, whether of the simpler and popular kind or of EXISTENCE AND IDEAS EXISTENCE AND IDEAS the more complex neurological kind, part of the technique of checking up the particular sort of extrinsic reference which should be given to an idea; discovery whether it is to be referred to a past, contemporary or future thing, or treated as due to wish and emotion. Even so, ascer¬ tainment of mode of stimulation and origin is always secondary and derived. We do not believe a thing to be “there” because we are directly cognizant of an external origin for our perception; we infer some external stimula¬ tion of our sensory apparatus because we are successfully engaged in motor response. Only when the latter fails, do we turn back and examine the matter of sensory stimu¬ lation. To say that I am now conscious of a typewriter as the source of sensory stimuli is to make a back-handed and sophisticated statement of the fact that I am engaged in active employment of the typewriter to produce cer¬ tain consequences, so that what I am aware of is these consequences and the relation to them of parts of the type¬ writer as means of producing them. As matter of fact, we never perceive the peripheral stimuli to which we are at that given time responding.
The notion that these stimuli are the appropriate and normal objects of simple original perceptions represents, as we have just said, an uncritical acceptance by psychol¬ ogists of an old logical and metaphysical dogma, one having neither origin nor justification within scientific psychol¬ ogy. We are aware only of stimuli to other responses than those which we are now making; we become aware of them when we analyze some performed total act to dis¬ cover the mechanism of its occurrence. To become aware of an optical or auditory stimulation involved in an act signifies that we now apprehend that an EXPERIENCE AND NATURE organic change is part of the means used in the act, so that soundness of its structure and working is requisite to efficient performance of the act. I do not usually, for example, hear the sounds made by the striking of the keys; hence I therefore bang at them or strike them unevenly. If I were better trained or more intelligent in the performance of this action, I should hear the sounds, for they would have ceased to be just stimuli and become means of direction of my behavior in securing conse¬ quences. Not having learned by the “touch-method,” my awareness of contact-qualities as I hit the keys is intermittent and defective. Physiological stimulation of fingers is involved as a condition of my motor response; yet there is no consciousness of contact “sensations” or sensa. But if I used my sensory touch appreciation as means to the proper execution of the act of writing, I should be aware of these qualities. The wider and freer the employment of means, the larger the field of sensory perceptions.
It is usual in current psychology to assert or assume that qualities observed are those of the stimulus. This as¬ sumption puts the cart before the horse; qualities which are observed are those attendant upon response to stimuli We are observantly aware (in distinction from inferentially aware) only of what has been done; we can perceive what is already there, what has happened. By description, a stim¬ ulus is not an object of perception, for stimulus is corre¬ lative to response, and is undetermined except as response occurs. I am not questioning as a fact of knowledge that certain things are the stimuli of visual and auditor}' per¬ ception. I am pointing out that we are aware of the stimuli only in terms of our response to them and of the conse- EXISTENCE AND IDEAS EXISTENCE AND IDEAS quences of this response. Argument as to the impossibility of stimuli being the object of perception is of course dia¬ lectical; like all dialectic arguments it is not convincing if confronted with facts to the contrary. But facts agree. The whiteness of the paper upon which words are being written and the blackness of the letters have been con¬ stantly operative stimuli in what I have been doing. It is equally certain that they have not been constantly perceived objects. If I have perceived them from time to time, it is in virtue of prior responses of which they were consequences, and because of the need of employing these attained consequences as means in further action. In the laboratory, as in the painter’s studio, colors are spe¬ cific objects of perception. But as perceived, they are “stimuli” only proleptically and by a shift in the universe of discourse.3 The color now and here perceived, in consequence of an organic adjustment to other stimuli than color, is in subsequent situations a stimulus to other modes of behavior, unconscious in so far as just a stimu¬ lus; conscious as far as a deliberately utilized means.
When color is perceived as it is, say, for painting or for matching colors in selection of dress goods, or in an esti¬ mate of the harmonious value of the hue of a wall-paper, or for determining from a spectral line the nature of a chemical substance. It signifies that we are responding in such a way as to form or bring into being a stimulus adequate to operate without being perceived. But in the meantime in consciousness it is means to an act which 3 The shift is evident in the fact that stimuli are stated as vibrations or electro-magnetic disturbance or in similar fashion; now vibrations are not observed while color the consequence, the effected coordination, is in direct consciousness.
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE will effect desired consequences. Shall this color be used? Will this particular piece of goods or pattern of wall paper serve the purpose in view? When such questions are determined, a final stimulus is achieved. What is then perceived is either some further consequence, or this consequence as a means in a new predicament, such as wearing the goods, hanging the wall-paper. The consciousness of stimuli marks the conclusion of an inves¬ tigation, not an original datum; and what is discovered is not the stimuli to that act, the inquiry, but to some other act, past or prospective, and it marks the conversion of de facto stimulus into potential means. The question of stimuli is a question of existential causation; and if Hume’s lesson had been learned as well as we flatter ourselves it is learned, we should be aware that any matter of causation refers to something extrinsic, to be reached by inquiry and inference.
We conclude, therefore, that while the word “percep¬ tion” may be limited to designate awareness of objects contemporaneously affecting the bodily organs, there is no ground whatever for the assumption which has usually attended this narrowing of the older meaning of the word: namely, that sense-perception has intrinsic properties or qualities marking it off from other forms of consciousness. Much less is there justification for the assumption that such perceptions are the original form of elementary awareness from which other forms of cognitive conscious¬ ness develop. On the contrary sensory-perceptual mean¬ ings are specifically discriminated objects of awareness; the discrimination takes place in the course of inquiry into causative conditions and consequences; the ultimate need for the inquiry is found in the necessity of dis- EXISTENCE AND IDEAS