EXISTENCE AND IDEAS covering what is to be done, or of developing a response suitably adapted to the requirements of a situation. When inquiry reveals that an object external to the organ¬ ism is now operative and affecting the organism, the per¬ tinency of overt action is established and the kind of overt adjustment that should be made is in evidence. Perceptual meanings (sensory-perceptual) contrast with other meanings in that either (a) the latter cannot be overtly acted upon now or immediately, but only at a deferred time, when specified conditions now absent have been brought into being — conceptual meanings —; or (b) that the latter are such that action upon them at any time must be of a dramatic or literary or playful sort — non-cognitive meanings. The necessities of behavior enforce very early in life the difference between acts demanded at once, and those pertinent only at a later time; yet making and refining the distinction is a matter of constant search and discovery, not, as the traditional theory presumes, an original and ready-made affair.
Thus we returned to the statement that apart from considerations of use and history there are no original and inherent differences between valid meanings and meanings occurring in revery, desiring, fearing, remem¬ bering, all being intrinsically the same in relation to events. This fact contains in gist the condemnation of introspec¬ tion.4 It makes no difference in principle whether the introspective doctrine takes a dialectical form, as in the Cartesian-Spinozistic logical realism in which intrinsic 4 It is not asserted that observations called introspection have never given results. It is claimed that in such cases, the procedure does not conform to the theoretical definition of immediate inspection but involves the results of inquiries into relationships with things not directly present.
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE self-evidency, clearness, adequacy, or truth, are imputed to some conceptual meanings or ideas; or whether it takes the more usual form of assigning to things appear¬ ing in the field of consciousness intrinsic properties which may be read off by direct inspection and thereby used to denominate them as sensory, perceptual, concep¬ tual, imaginative, fantastic, memory, emotional, voli¬ tional, etc. It is asserted that in every case, the basis of classification is extrinsic, an affair dependent upon a study, often hard to make, of generating conditions and of subsequent careers. The denominations are interpretations, and like all interpretations are adequate only when con¬ trolled by wide and accurate information as to bodies of fact that are remote and extraneous. It is not too much to say that the introspective doctrine — much wider in logical scope than so-called introspective psychology — is the last desperate stand and fortress of the classic doc¬ trine that knowledge is immediate grasp, intuition, envis- agement, possession. It is this fact which constitutes the importance of the views that have been criticized. Until they have been criticized, until the assumption of immediate intrinsic differences in the meaning-objects of sensory perceptions, reveries, dreams, desires, emotions, has been expelled, the actual relation of ideas to existences must remain an obscure and confused matter.
If one looks at the net results of physiological inquiry upon psychologist insight, one seems bound to conclude that while potentially they are enormous, actually they consist largely in making more emphatic and conspicu¬ ous the old metaphysical problem of the relation of mind and body, and in strengthening a leaning to the parallel- istic hypothesis. The explanation is that they have not EXISTENCE AND IDEAS been used for what they really are: an important part of our scientific resources with respect to the intelligent conduct of behavior in general, and the discrimination in particular of various kinds of meanings from one another. It is one thing to employ, for example, the distinction between central and peripheral origin of the existence of this and that idea as part of the technique of determining their respective cognitive validities, and quite another to assume that ideas and conscious contents are already intrinsically marked off in themselves (and there¬ fore for direct observation or introspection), and that the problem is simply to find physiological equivalents for their distinction. As far as it is assumed that modes of consciousness are in themselves already differentiated into sensory, perceptual, conceptual, imaginative, retentive, emotional, conative (or may be so discriminated by direct inspection), physiological study will consist simply of search for the different bodily and neural processes that underlie these differences. The outcome is an exacer¬ bation of the traditional mind-body problem; the doctrine of parallelism, instead of being either a scientific discov¬ ery or a scientific postulate, is merely a formulation of the original psychological ready-made distinctions plus a more detailed knowledge of physical existential conditions of their occurrence.
If the problem is put as one of a more adequate control of behavior through knowledge of its mechanism, the situation becomes very different. How should we treat a particular meaning: as sound datum for inference, as an effect of habit irrespective of present condition, as an instance of desire, or a consequence of hope or fear, a token of some past psycho-physical maladjustment, or EXPERIENCE AND NATURE how? Such questions as these are urgent questions in the conduct of life. They are typical of questions which we must find a way of answering if we are to achieve any method of mastering our own behavior similar to that which we have achieved in respect to heat and electricity, coal and iron. And knowledge of the conditions under which our meanings and our modes of taking and using them organically occur is an indispensable portion of the technique of dealing with such questions. In princi¬ ple, there is no difference between the neurological inquiry and those astronomical inquiries which enable an astrono¬ mer to determine the standing and import of some idea in his universe of discourse. The physiological inquiries no more involve a peculiar problem of mind-body than do the astronomical inquiries. Their subject-matter is part of the objective matter-of-fact considerations which extend and buttress inferential conclusions. In concrete subject- matter, they differ, being concerned with organic struc¬ tures and processes; but this is only a difference in con¬ crete subject-matter, like that between astronomical and botanical. The peculiar importance of the physio¬ logical material is that in some form it enters as a factor into the occurrence of every meaning and every act, including the astronomical and botanical.
We return, accordingly, from this excursion to the assertion that the objects of revery-consciousness are just as much cases of perceived meanings or ideas of events as are those of sensory perceptual consciousness. Only — they are not as good objects with respect to direction of subsequent conduct, including the conduct of knowledge. Revery-consciousness, and the influence upon beliefs of affective wishes of which we are not aware, are facts EXISTENCE AND IDEAS crucial for any theory of consciousness. If they support the hypothesis that all consciousness is awareness of meanings, they also seem at first sight to contradict the supposition that the meanings perceived are those of natural events. Since their objects are notoriously “un¬ real,” they seem to support the notion that consciousness is disconnected from physical events, and that any valid connection which may be set up, either in practical con¬ duct or in knowing, is adventitious.
There is indeed much to be said for the view that con¬ sciousness is originally a dream-like, irresponsible efflores¬ cence, and that it gains reference to actual events in nature only under stern compulsion, and by way of accidental coincidence. There are elements of truth in this view, as against the orthodox tradition which makes consciousness architectonic, having righteous and rational conformity as the corner stone of its structure. Ideas, ob¬ jects of immediate awareness, are too desultory, fantastic, and impertinent to be consistent with the classic tradition, whether of the sensationalistic or the rationalistic schools. But the view of complete separation of existential con¬ sciousness from connection with physical things cannot be maintained in view of what is known of its specifiable connections with organic conditions, and of the intimate, unbroken connection of organic with extra-organic events. It can be maintained only by holding that the connection of consciousness in its varied forms with bodily action is non-natural. The only reason for asserting this position lies in the dialectic compulsion of denial of quality to natural events, and arrogation of superior existence to causal antecedents.
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE Given the connection of meanings with environmental- organic integrations (including those of social intercourse) and there is nothing surprising that consciousness should often be of the revery and wish type. We find no great occasion for wonder in the fact that a person who has been taught that the sun moves around the earth, rising above it at sunrise and going under it at sunset, should himself hold that belief. Well, past consummatory experi¬ ences have taught the individual many things; they have taught him what conjunctions are agreeable and what dis¬ agreeable. Just as past teaching regarding sun and earth have conditioned subsequent behavior, have produced organic modifications in the way of habit which influence subsequent reactions, including interpretations, so with what was taught by having been implicated in a consum¬ matory union of environment and organism. Here too a bias in organic modification is set up; it acts to perpetuate, wherever possible, awareness of fruitions, and to avert perception of frustrations and inconvenient interruptions.
A consciousness which is set on the outside over against the course of nature, which is not a partaker in its moving changes, would have to conform to one or other of two schemes. In one alternative, the consciousness of such a being would be gifted with an infallible spectatorship conjoined with perfect innocency of impartial recorder- ship; it would see and report the world exactly as if it were itself knowingly engaged in producing what it saw and reported. Or, in the other alternative, all conscious¬ ness would be so completely irrelevant to the world of which it is outside and beyond, that there would be no common denominator or common multiple. Obviously facts do not agree with either of these suppositions. We EXISTENCE AND IDEAS EXISTENCE AND IDEAS dream, but the material of our dream life is the stuff of our waking life. Revery is not first wholly detached from objects of purposeful action and belief, coming later by discipline to acquire reference to them. Its objects con¬ sist of the objects of daily concern subjected to a strange perspective, perverted in behalf of a bias. Such empiri¬ cal facts as these, or the fact that the world of fancy is the ordinary world as we like it to be, as we find it agree¬ able, is fatal to any theory which seriously asserts the wholesale irrelevance of the material of consciousness to the things of the actual world. Irrelevance exists, but it is relative and specifiable. An idea or emotion is irrelevant not as such, through and through, but because it is a version of the meaning of events which if it were differently edited would be relevant to actions in the world to which it belongs.
To par-take and to per-ceive are allied performances. To perceive is a mode of partaking which occurs only under complex conditions and with its own defining traits. Everything of importance hangs upon what particular one of the many possible ways of partaking is employed in a given situation. The organism, wherever possible, participates a son gre; its taste and bias are conditioned, in the degree of its susceptibility and retentiveness, upon prior satisfactions. If a man has experienced a world which is good, why should not he act to remake a bad world till it agrees with the good world which he has once possessed? And if the task of overt transformation is too great for his powers, why should he not at least act so as to get the renewed sense of a good world? These questions express the working logic of human action; the first, the way of objective transformation, is the EXPERIENCE AND NATURE method of action in the arts and sciences; the second, of action that is fanciful, “wish-fulfilling, ” romantic, myth¬ making.
The immense difference between the two modes of action has had to be learned. There is no original and intrinsic difference in the respective modes of conscious¬ ness accompanying the two kinds of acts. In some mat¬ ters, the lesson is readily and quickly learned. Such matters constitute the objects of usual every-day sense- perception, the objects of common-sense. Certain organic- integrations have to occur if life is to continue. Suste¬ nance must be had; destructive enemies must be kept away; the help of others must be availed of. Meanings and ideas connected with these organic-environmental adjust¬ ments are substantially sound as far as adjustments are successfully made — and within limits they are ordinarily so made, or life ceases. Such gross ideas as a world of things and persons external to our personal wishes and fancies, and as the continuance of energies once set in motion, are so recurrently and emphatically taught that they are never sincerely doubted. Ideas of specific fea¬ tures of this external world (external to us, since it exacts so much of us in effort before it conforms to the needs that are most deeply ourselves), ideas of fire, food, furni¬ ture, weather and crops, of our friends and enemies, and of our own past and probable future, are so repeatedly presented in the connections of actions and so confirmed by consequences that they become matters of course, substantially valid. They thus form a kind of privileged domain, which, although an island in a sea of ideas where ground is not readily touched, has been by too hasty and impatient theories taken to form the original and in- EXISTENCE AND IDEAS herent constitution of consciousness. In consequence, there is added to genuine natural realism which accepts the casual connection of ideas with events and their po¬ tential reference to subsequent events, a specious realistic theory which takes the island for a solid and complete continent. Characteristic traits of the whole continent of mind are then looked upon as if they were only in¬ cidental faults and dislocations, to be explained away by dialectic ingenuity; or when the strata of fancy, illusion, error and misinterpretation are realized, wholesale scep¬ ticism is indulged in.
Gradually the technique involved in making ordinary organic-environmental adjustments is discovered, and becomes capable of extension to cases where fancy had previously reigned. A larger and larger field of ideas becomes susceptible of analytic objective reference, with the promise of approximate validity. The secret of this technique lies in control of the ways in which the organ¬ ism participates in the course of events. In the case of simple needs and simple environments, existing organic structures practically enforce correct participation; the result is so-called instinctive action. Within this range, modifications undergone by the organism form in the main effective habits. But organic preparation for varied situation having many factors and wide-reaching conse¬ quences is not so easily attained. Effective participa¬ tion here depends upon the use of extra-organic conditions, which supplement structural agencies; namely, tools and other persons, by means of language spoken and recorded. Thus the ultimate buttress of the soundness of all but the simplest ideas consists in the cumulative objective appli¬ ances and arts of the community, not in anything found in “consciousness” itself or within the organism.
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE If any evidence be needed of the artificial character of strictly epistemological discussion it may be found in the fact that it goes on exclusively in terms of an alleged direct contact of “subject” and “object,” with total neglect of all the indispensable tools of checking spontaneous beliefs and developing sound ones in their place. Pendu¬ lums, lenses, prisms, yard sticks, and pound weights and multiplication and logarithmic tables have a great deal more to do with valid knowing, since they enable the organism to partake with other things in the effecting of consequences, than have bare consciousness or brain and nerves. Without such objective resources to direct the manner of engaging in responsive adaptations, ideas, outside a simple range of constantly tested actions, are at the mercy of any peculiarity of organic constitution and of circumstance; myths are rife and the world is peopled with fabulous personages and is the home of occult forces. Since organic modifications due to past consum- matory objects are dominant, since they lead an individual to find or make a world congenial to them; and since man is most at home with his fellows, whether friends or enemies, the world is then taken animistically for the most part. Too many of the traditional ideas of fife, soul, mind, spirit, and consciousness, and of the cosmos itself, even in philosophy, are only attenuated versions of this animism, spontaneous, and often gracious even though fantastic, when men lacked instrumentalities by which to direct their active partakings in nature, but which are now graceless and obstructive.
In conclusion, the fact that consciousness of meanings, or having ideas, denotes an exigent re-making of meanings has an import for the theory of nature. Perceptibility EXISTENCE AND IDEAS is an exponent of contingency as it intersects the regular. The impossibility of “deducing” consciousness from physi¬ cal laws, the “impassible gulf” between the physical and mental, are in reality but conspicuous cases of the general impossibility of deriving the contingent from the neces¬ sary, the uncertain from the regular. The anomaly apparent in the occurrence of consciousness is evidence of an anomalous phase in nature itself. Unless there were something problematic, undecided, still going-on and as yet unfinished and indeterminate, in nature, there could be no such events as perceptions. The point of maximum apparency is the point of greatest stress and undeter¬ mined potentiality; the point of maximum of restless shift, while also the point of greatest brightness; it is vivid, but not clear; imminent, urgently expressive of the impending, but not defined, till it has been disposed of and has ceased to be immediately focal. When philosophers have insisted upon the certainty of the immediately and focally present or “given” and have sought indubitable immediate existential data upon which to build, they have always unwittingly passed from the existential to the dialectical; they have substituted a general character for an immediate this. For the immediately given is always the dubious; it is always a matter for subsequent events to determine, or assign character to. It is a cry for some¬ thing not given, a request addressed to fortune, with the pathos of a plea or the imperiousness of a command. It were, conceivably, “better” that nature should be finished through and through, a closed mechanical or closed teleo¬ logical structure, such as philosophic schools have fancied. But in that case the flickering candle of consciousness would go out.
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE The immediate perceptibility of meanings, the very existence of ideas, testifies to insertion of the problematic and hazardous in the settled and uniform, and to the meeting, crossing and parting of the substantial, static, and the transitive and particular. Meanings, characters as such have that solidity, coherence, endurance, and persistent availability, which our idiom calls substance. Yet were this the whole story, meanings not only would not be perceived, but they would not be meanings. They would be tough operative habits, having their own way not to be denied. Organic movements exist to which there occured in early life meanings so indurated that now they are habits of an over-riding power; meaning has disappeared in bare behavior. It is possible to under¬ stand the regret with which some persons contemplate the passage of thought into act; to them it seems the obsequies of an idea; thought has been dissipated in an outward mechanical sequence. Similarly, one may feel that the important and interesting thing in human history is not what men have done, their successes, but what they failed in doing — the desires and imaginings, forbidden execution by the force of events. Ideas are largely the obverse side of action; a perception of what might be, but is not, the promise of things hoped for, the symbol of things not seen. A fixed idea is no idea at all, but a routine compulsion of overt action, perfunctorily and mechanically named idea.
“Pure reason” would thus not be rational at all, but an automatic habit; a substance so stable and pervading as to have no limits and vicissitudes, and hence no percep¬ tibility. “Pure” reasoning is best carried on by fixed symbols, automatically manipulated; its ideal is some- EXISTENCE AND IDEAS tiling approaching the well-devised mechanically operat¬ ive calculating machine. Unless nature had regular habits, persistent ways, so compacted that they time, measure and give rhythm and recurrence to transitive flux, meanings, recognizable characters, could not be. But also without an interplay of these patient, slow- moving, not easily stirred systems of action with swift- moving, unstable, unsubstantial events, nature would be a routine unmarked by ideas. Adjustment of the slow moving changes of nature to its sudden starts and trep¬ idations, such as gives some degree of order to the latter and as re-adapts the motions of the sluggish and inert core to the volatile surface of hasty movements, makes necessary a conversion of static orders into stable mean¬ ings, while it also renders them perceptible, or ideas, as they answer to the flux of things.
Finally, as psycho-physical qualities testify to the pres¬ ence in nature of needs and satisfactions, of uneasy efforts and their arrest in some limiting termination, so conscious or conspicuously apparent meanings, ideas, are exponents of the deliberate use of the efficacious in behalf of the fulfilling and consummatory, and of the efficient or instru¬ mental nature of the final. This situation is empirically present to us in the arts, and will be discussed in the imme¬ diate sequel. For our immediate purpose, it is enough to point out the difference between the explicit natural teleology of classic metaphysics and the implicit tele¬ ology of modern science. In the former, the bare de facto arrests of nature, which often mark merely exhaustion or else limits imposed by competing energies, were by a tour de force assigned eulogistic properties. They were identified with the objects that should be the objects of EXPERIENCE AND NATURE choice by persons of mature and reflective experience. Thus physics was unwittingly infected by importation of an uncriticized ethic of customary and fixed ends, and of a dialectically ordered hierarchy of fixed means. The identification in modern thought of ends with ends-in- view, with deliberate purpose and planning, of means