welfare varies, but the influence of interest in it is perva¬ sive and inescapable. In a vital, though not the con¬ ventional, sense all men think with a moral bias and con¬ cern, the “immoral” man as truly as the righteous man; wicked and just men being characterized bv bents toward different kinds of things as good. Now this fact seems to me of great importance for philosophy; it indicates that (j> in some sense all philosophy is a branch of morals. But acknowledgment that the ultimate ground of reflection is to enable men better to make choice of things as good and bad is in truth the opposite attitude from that which immediately converts traits of existence into moral quali¬ ties, and which transforms preferred qualities into proper¬ ties of true and real being. For the former concerns action to be performed, the direction of desire, purpose and endeavor. The latter is an affair of existence as it is found to be; material, it may be, of choice and action, but material, not goal or finished object.
For reflection the eventual is always better or worse than the given. But since it would also be better if the eventual good were now given, the philosopher, belonging by status to a leisure class relieved from the more urgent necessity of dealing with conditions, converts the eventual into some kind of Being, something which is, even if it does not exist. Permanence, real essence, totality, order, unity, rationality, the unum, verum, et bo mini of the classic tradition, are obviously eulogistic predicates. When ac¬ cordingly we find such terms used to describe the founda¬ tions and proper conclusions of a philosophic system, there is ground for suspecting that an artificial simplifica¬ tion of existence has been performed. Reflection deter¬ mining preference for an eventual good has dialectically 34 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE wrought a miracle of transubstantiation. Here if any¬ where it is needful that we return to the mixed and en¬ tangled things expressed by the term experience.
The occurrence of the moral fallacy is obscured and disguised in subtle ways. That having the greatest power of self-deception springs from the conventional asspcia; tions of the word moral. When a thinker has escaped from them he fancies that he has escaped morals. His conclusions are fixed by a preference for a reflective “good,” that is to say by preference for things which have a quality of goodness that satisfies the requirements of reasonable examination and judgment. But overtly he may con¬ temn the moral life, on the ground that it involves strug¬ gle, effort, disappointment, constantly renewed. Hence he asserts that the true good is non-moral, since it includes none of these things. According to special temperament and to accidents of education, due in turn largely to social and economic status, the true good is then con¬ ceived either esthetically, or dialectically, or in terms borrowed from a religious context. Then “reality” a$ the object of philosophic research is described with the properties required by the choice of good that has oc¬ curred. The significant thing, however, is not the thinker’s disparaging view of moral life as conflict and practical effort; it is that his reflective idea of the good, which after all is the essence of morals, has been con¬ verted into a norm and model of Being. His choice of what is good, whether logically conceived or instigated by cultivated taste, is the heart of the matter.
The operation of choice isHLsuppose, inevitable in any enterprise into which reflection enters. It is not in itself falsifying. Deception lies in the fact that its presence is PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 35 concealed, disguised, denied. An empirical method finds and points to the operation of choice as it does to any other event. Thus it protects us from conversion of eventual functions into antecedent existence: a conversion that may be said to be the philosophic fallacy, whether it be performed in behalf of mathematical subsistences, esthe¬ tic essences, the purely physical order of nature, or God. The present writer does not profess any greater candor of intent than animates fellow philosophers. But the pur¬ suance of an empirical method, is, it is submitted, the way to secure execution of candid intent. Whatever is em¬ ployed as subject-matter of choice, determining its need and giving it guidance, an empirical method frankly indicates for what it is; and the fact of choice, with its workings and consequences, an empirical method points out with equal openness.
The adoption of an empirical method is no guarantee that all the things relevant to any particular conclusion will actually be found or pointed to, or that when found they will be correctly shown or communicated. But the empirical method points out when and where and how things of a designated description have been arrived c at. It places before others a map of the road that has been travelled: they may accordingly, if they will, re¬ travel the road to inspect the landscape for themselves. Thus the findings of one may be rectified and extended by the findings of others, with as much assurance as is humanly possible of confirmation, extension and rectifi¬ cation. The adoption of empirical, or denotative, method would thus procure for philosophic reflection something of that cooperative tendency toward consensus which marks inquiry in the natural sciences. The scientific investiga- 36 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE tor convinces others not by the plausibility of his defini¬ tions and the cogency of his dialectic, but bv placing lldQr£T.heinl]Le„^miiMmur^e.of, experiences, of search¬ ings, doings and findings in consequence of which certain things have been found. His appeal is for others to traverse a similar course, so as to see how what they find corresponds with his report.
Dialectic thereby itself receives a designated status and office. As it occurs in philosophic thought its depend¬ ence upon an original act of selective choice is often not avowed- Its premises are alleged to be indubitable and i self-guaranteeing. Honest empirical method will state when and where and why the act of selection took place, and thus enable others to repeat it and test its worth. Selective choice, denoted as an empirical event will reveal the basis and bearing of intellectual simplifications; they then cease to be of such a self-enclosed nature as to be affairs only of opinion and argument, admitting no alternatives save complete acceptance or rejection. Choice that is disguised or denied is the source of those astounding differences of philosophic belief that startle the beginner and that become the plaything of the expert. Choice that is avowed is an experiment to be tried on its merits and tested by its results. Under all the captions that are called immediate knowledge, or self-sufficient certitude of belief, whether logical, esthetic or epistemo¬ logical, there is something selected for a purpose, and hence not simple, not self-evident and not intrinsically feulogizable. State the purpose so that it may be re¬ experienced, and its value and the pertinency of selection made in its behalf may be tested. The purport of t.hink- ing, scientific and philosophic, is not to eliminate choice PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 37 but to render it less arbitrary, and more significant. It loses its arbitrary character when its quality and conse¬ quences are such as to commend themselves to the reflection of others after they have betaken themselves to the situations indicated; it becomes significant when rea¬ son for the choice is found to be weighty, and its conse¬ quences momentous. This statement is not a commen¬ dation of the will to believe. It is not a statement that we should choose, or that some choices are self- justifying. It is a statement that wherever reflection occurs and intelli¬ gence operates, a selective discrimination does occur. The justification of a choice is wholly another matter; it is extrinsic. It depends upon the extent in which observa¬ tion, memory and forethought have entered into making the choice, and upon the consequences that flow from it. When choice is avowed, others can repeat the course of the experience; itis an experiment to be tried, not an auto¬ matic safety device.
This particular affair is referred to here not so much as matter of doctrine as to afford an illustration of the nature of empirical method. Truth or falsity depends upon •war of observing reflective events. An empirical finding is re¬ futed not by denial that one finds things to be thus and so, but by giving directions for a course of experience that results in finding its opposite to be the case. To convince of error as well as to lead to truth is to assist another to see and find something which he hitherto has failed to find and recognize. All of the wit and subtlety of reflection and of dialectic find scope in the elaboration and convey¬ ing of directions that intelligibly point out a course to be followed. Every system of philosophy presents the con- 38 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE sequences of some such experiment. As experiments, each has contributed something of worth to our observa¬ tion of the events and qualities of experienceable objects. Some harsh criticisms of traditional philosophy have already been suggested; others will doubtless.Jollow. But the criticism is not directed at the experiments; it is aimed at the denial to them by the philosophic tradition of selective experimental quality, a denial which has isolated them from their actual context and function, and has thereby converted potential illuminations into arbi¬ trary assertions.
All philosophies employ empirical subject-matter, even the most transcendental; there is nothing else for them to goby. But in ignoring the kind of empirical situation to which their themes pertain and in failing to supply direc¬ tions for experimental pointing and searching they be¬ come non-empirical. Hence it may be asserted that the final issue of empirical method is whether the guide and standard of beliefs and conduct lies within or without the shareable situations of lifg. The ultimate accusation ' levelled against professedly non-empirical philosophies is that in casting aspersion upon the events and objects of experience, they deny the power of common life to develop its own regulative methods and to furnish from within itself adequate goals, ideals, and criteria. Thus in effect they claim a^private access to truth and deprive the things of common experience of the enlightenment and guidance that philosophy might otherwise derive from them. The transcendentalist has conspired with his arch-enemy, the sensualist, to narrow the acknowledged.
PHILOSOPHIC METHOD 39 sub ject-matter of experience and to lessen its potencies for a wider and directed reflective choice. Respect for experience is respect for its possibilities in thought and knowledge as well as an enforced attention to its joys and sorrows. Intellectual piety toward experience is a pre¬ condition of the direction of life and of tolerant and gener¬ ous cooperation among men. Respect for the things of experience alone brings with it such a respect for others, the centres of experience, as is free from patronage, dom¬ ination and the will to impose.
CHAPTER TWO Existence as Precarious and as Stable It was suggested in the last chapter that experience has its equivalents in such affairs as history, life, culture. Reference to these other affairs enables us to put to one side the reminiscences which so readily give the word experience a sectarian and provincial content. Accord¬ ing to Tylor, culture is “that complex whole which in¬ cludes knowledge, belief, art, morals, custom, and any other capabilities acquired by a man as a member of society.” It is, in some sense, a whole, but it is a com¬ plex, a diversified whole. It is differentiated into re¬ ligion, magic, law, fine and useful art, science, philosophy, language, domestic and political relations, etc. Con¬ sider the following words of an anthropologist and ask if they do not fairly define the problem of philosophy, although intended for another purpose. “Cultural reali¬ ty is never wholly deterministic nor yet wholly accidental, never wholly psychological nor yet wholly objective, never wholly of yesterday nor yet wholly of today, but combines all of these in its existential reality.
A reconstructive synthesis re-establishes the synthetic unity necessarily lost in the process of analytic dismem¬ berment.”1 I do not mean that philosophy is to be merged in an anthropological view of culture. But in a different context and by a different method, it has the task of analytic dismemberment and synthetic reconstruction of experience; the phenomena of culture as presented by 1 Goldenweiser.
EXISTENCE 41 the anthropologist provide, moreover, precious material to aid the performance of this office, material more pertinent to the task of philosophizing than that of psychology isolated from a theory of culture.
A feature of existence which is emphasized bv cultural «- C"* phenomena is the precarious and perilous. Sumner refers to Grimm as authority for the statement that the Germanic tribes had over a thousand distinct savings.
proverbs and apothegms, _ concerning luck. Time is brief, and this statement must stand instead of the dis¬ course which the subject deserves. Man finds himself living in an aleatory world: his existence involves, to put ty'*’ it baldly, a gamble. The world is a scene of risk: it is uncertain, unstable, uncannily unstable. Its dangers are irregular, inconstant, not to be counted upon as to their times and seasons. Although persistent, they are spora¬ dic, episodic. It js_ darkest just before dawn; pride goes before a fall: the moment of greatest prosperity is the moment most charged with ill-omen, most opportune for the evil eye. Plague, famine, failure of crops, disease, death, defeat in battle, are always just around the corner, and so are abundance, strength, victory, festival and song.
Luck is proverbially both good and bad in its distribu¬ tions. The sacred and the accursed are potentialities of the same situation; and there is no category of things which has not embodied the sacred and accursed: per¬ sons, words, places, times, directions in space, stones, winds, animals, stars.
Anthropologists have shown incontrovertiblv the part played by the precarious aspect of the world in generating religion with its ceremonies, rites, cults, myths, magic; and it has shown the pervasive penetration of these af- 42 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE fairs into morals, law, art, and industry. Beliefs and dispositions connected with them are the background out of which philosophy and secular morals slowly de¬ veloped, as well as more slowly those late inventions, art for art’s sake, and business is business. Interesting and instructive as is this fact, it is not the ramifications which here concern us. We must not be diverted to consider the consequences for philosophy, even for doctrines reigning today, of facts concerning the origin of philosophies. We confine ourselves to one outstanding fact: the evidence that the world of empirical things includes the uncertain, unpredictable, uncontrollable. and hazardous.
It is an old saying that the gods were born of fear. The saying is only too likely to strengthen a misconcep¬ tion bred by confirmed subjective habits. We first endow man in isolation with an instinct of fear and then we imagine him irrationally ejecting that fear into the environment, scattering broadcast as it were, the fruits of his own purely personal limitations, and thereby creating superstition. But fear, whether an instinct or an acquisition, is a function of the environment. Man fears because he exists in a fearful, an awful world. The world is precarious and perilous. It is as easily accessible and striking evidence of this fact that primi¬ tive experience is cited. The voice is that of early man; but the hand is that of nature, the nature in which we still live. It was not fear of gods that created the gods.
For if the life of early man is filled with expiations and propitiations, if in his feasts and festivals what is enjoyed is gratefully shared with his gods, it is not because a belief in supernatural, powers created a need for ex- EXISTENCE 43 piatory, propitiatory and communal offerings. Every- thing that man achieves and possesses is got by actions that mav involve him in other and obnoxious conse¬ quences in addition to those wanted and enjoyed. His acts are trespasses upon the domain of the unknown; and hence atonement, if offered in season, may ward off direful consequences that haunt even the moment of prosperity — or that most haunt that moment. While unknown consequences flowing from the past dog the present, the future is even more unknown and perilous: the present by that fact is ominous. If unknown forces that decide future destiny can be placated, the man who will not study the methods of securing their favor is incredibly flippant. In enjoyment of present food and companionship, nature, tradition and social organization have cooperated, thereby supplementing our own endeav¬ ors so petty and so feeble without this extraneous rein¬ forcement. Goods are bv grace not of ourselves. He is a dangerous churl who will not gratefully acknowledge by. means of free-will offerings the help that sustains him.
These things are as true today as they were in the days of early culture. It is not the facts which have changed, but the methods of insurance, regulation and acknowledgment. Herbert Spencer sometimes colored his devotion to symbolic experiences with a fact of direct experience. When he says that every fact has two opposite sides, “the one its near or visible side and the other its remote or invisible side.” he expresses a per¬ sistent trait of every object in experience. The visible is set in the invisible; and in the end what is unseen decides what happens in the seen; the tangible rests pre- 44 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE cariously upon the untouched _ and _ungrasped. The contrast and the potential maladjustment of the im¬ mediate, the conspicuous and focal phase of things, with those indirect and hidden factors which determine the origin and career of what is present, are indestructible features of any and every experience. We may term the way in which our ancestors dealt with the contrast super¬ stitious, but the contrast is no superstition. It is a pri¬ mary datum in any experience.
We have substituted sophistication for superstition, at least measurably so. But the sophistication is often as irrational and as much at the mercy of words as the superstition it replaces. Our magical safeguard against the uncertain character of the world is to deny the exis- tence of chance, to mumble universal and necessary law, the ubiquity of cause and effect, the uniformity of nature, universal progress, and the inherent rationality of the universe. These magic formulae borrow their potency from conditions that are not magical. Through science we have secured a degree of power of prediction and of control; through tools, machinery and an ac¬ companying technique we have made the world more conformable to our needs, a more secure abode. We have heaped up riches and means of comfort between ourselves and the risks of the world. We have profes- sionalized amusement as an agency of escape and for¬ getfulness. But when all is said and done, the funda¬ mentally hazardous character of the world is not seriously modified, much less eliminated. Such an incident as the last war and preparations for a future war remind us that it is easy to overlook the extent to which, after all, our attainments are only devices for blurring the dis- EXISTENCE 45 EXISTENCE 45 agreeable recognition of a fact, instead of means of altering the fact itself.
What has been said sounds pessimistic. But the con¬ cern is not with morals but with metaphysics, with, that is to say, the nature of the existential world in which we live. It would have been as easy and more comfortable to emphasize good luck, grace, unexpected and unwon joys, those unsought for happenings which we so signi¬ ficantly call happiness. We might have appealed to good fortune as evidence of this important trait of hazard in nature. Comedy is as genuine as tragedy. But it is traditional that comedy strikes a more superficial iiofe than tragedy. And there is an even better reason for appealing to misfortunes and mistakes as evidence of the precarious nature of the world. The problem of evil is a well recognized problem, while we rarely or nevgr hear of a problem of good. Goods we take for granted: they are as they should be; they are natural and proper. The good is a recognition of our deserts. When we pull out a, plum we treat it as evidence of. the real order of cause and effect in the world. For this reason it is diffi¬ cult for the goods of existence to furnish as convincing evidence of the uncertain character of nature as do evils. It is the latter we term accidents, not the former, even when their adventitious character is as certain.
What of it all, it may be asked? In the sense in which an assertion is true that uncontrolled distribution of good and evil is evidence of the precarious, uncertain nature of existence, it is a truism, and no problem is forwarded by its reiteration. But it is submitted that j ust this predicament of the inextricable mixtur.e_of stability and uncertainty gives rise to philosophy, and 46 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE that it is reflected in all its recurrent problems and issues.
If classic philosophy says so much about unity and so little about unreconciled diversity, so much about the eternal and permanent, and so little about change (save as something to be resolved into combinations of the permanent), so much about necessity and so little about contingency, so much about the comprehending universal and so little about the recalcitrant particular, it may well be because the ambiguousness and ambivalence of reality are actually so pervasive. Since these things form the problem, solution is more apparent, (although not more actual) in the degree in which whatever of stability and assurance the world presents is fastened upon and asserted.
Upon their surface, the reports of the world which form our different philosophies are various to the point of stark contrariness. They range from spiritualism to materialism,, from absolutism to relativistic pheno¬ menalism, from transcendentalism to positivism, from rationalism to sensationalism, from idealism to realism, from subjectivism to bald objectivism, from Platonic realism to nominalism. The array of contraditions is so imposing as to suggest to sceptics that the mind of man has tackled an impossible job, or that philosophers have abandoned themselves to vagary. These radical op¬ positions in philosophers suggest however another con¬ sideration. They suggest that all their different philos¬ ophies have a common premise, and that their diversity is due to acceptance of a common premise. Variant philosophies may be looked at as different wavs of sup¬ plying recipes for denying to the universe the character of contingency which it possesses so integrally that its EXISTENCE 47 denial leaves the reflecting mind without a clew, and puts subsequent philosophising at the mercy of tempera¬ ment, interest and local surroundings.
Quarrels among conflicting types of philosophy are thus family quarrels. They go on within the limits of a too domestic circle, and can be settled only by venturing further afield, and out of doors. Concerned with im¬ puting complete, finished and sure character to the world of real existence, even if things have to be broken into two disconnected pieces in order to accomplish the result, the character desiderated can plausibly be found in reason or in mechanism; in rational conceptions like those of mathematics, or brute things like sensory data; in atoms or in essences; in consciousness or in a physical externality which forces and overrides consciousness.
As against this common identification of reality with what is sure, regular and finished, experience in unsophis¬ ticated forms gives evidence of a different world and points to a different metaphysics. We live in a world which is an impressive and irresistible mixture of suf¬ ficiencies, tight completenesses, order, recurrences which make possible prediction and control, and singularities, ambiguities, uncertain possibilities, processes going on to consequences as yet indeterminate. They are mixed not mechanically but vitally like the wheat and tares of the parable. We may recognize them separately but we cannot divide them, for unlike wheat and tares they grow from the same root. Qualities have defects as neces¬ sary conditions of their excellencies; the instrumentalities of truth are the causes of error; change gives meaning to permanence and recurrence makes novelty possible. A_ world that was wholly risky would be a world in which 48 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE adventure is impossible, and only a living world can in¬ clude death. Such facts have been celebrated by think¬ ers like Heracleitus and Laotze; they have been greeted by theologians as furnishing occasions for exercise of divine grace; they have been elaborately formulated by various schools under a principle of relativity, so de¬ fined as to become itself final and absolute. They have rarely been frankly recognized as fundamentally signifi¬ cant for the formation of a naturalistic metaphysics.
Aristotle perhaps came the nearest to a start in that direction. But his thought did not go far on the road, though it may be used to suggest the road which he failed to take. Aristotle acknowledges contingency, but he never surrenders his bias in favor of the fixed. certain and finished. His whole theory of forms and ends is a theory of the superiority in Being of rounded- out fixities. His physics is a fixation of ranks or grades of necessity and contingency so sorted that necessity measures dignity and equals degree of reality, while con¬ tingency and change measure degrees of deficiency of Being. The empirical impact and sting of the mixture of universality and singularity and chance is evaded by parcelling out the regions of space so that they have their natural abode in different portions of nature. His logic is one of definition and classification, so that its task is completed when changing and contingent things are distinguished from the necessary, universal and fixed, by attribution to inferior species of things. Chance ap¬ pears in thought not as a calculus of probabilities in pre¬ dicting the observable occurrence of any and every event, but as marking an inferior type of syllogism. Things that move are intrinsically different from things EXISTENCE 49 that exhibit eternal regularity. Change is honestly recognized as a genuine feature of some things, but the point of the recognition is avoided by imputing altera¬ tion to inherent deficiency of Being over against com¬ plete Being which never changes. Changing things be¬ long to a purgatorial realm, where they wander aimlessly until redeemed by love of finality of form, the acquisi¬ tion of which lifts them to a paradise of self-sufficient Being. With slight exaggeration, it may be said that the thoroughgoing way in which Aristotle defined, dis¬ tinguished and classified rest and movement, the finished and the incomplete, the actual and potential, did more to fix tradition, the genteel tradition one is tempted to add, which identifies the fixed and regular with reality of Being and the changing and hazardous with deficiency of Being than ever was accomplished by those who took the shorter path of asserting that change is illusory. I His philosophy was closer to empirical facts than most modern philosophies, in that it was neither monistic nor dualistic but openly pluralistic. His plurals fall however, within a grammatical system, to each portion of which a corresponding cosmic status is allotted. Thus his pluralism solved the problem of how to have your cake