It is as irritating to have experience of beauty and moral goodness reduced to groundless whims as to have that of truth. Common-sense has an inexpugnable conviction that there are immediate goods of enjoyment and conduct, and that there are principles by which they may be appraised and rectified. Common-sense enter¬ tains this firm conviction because it is innocent of any rigid demarcation between knowledge on one side and belief, conduct and esthetic appreciation on the other. It is guiltless of the division between objective reality and subjective events. It takes striving, purposing, inquiring, wanting, the life of “practice,” to be as much facts of nature as are the themes of scientific discourse; to it, indeed, the former has a more direct and urgent reality. Hence it has no difficulty with the idea of ra¬ tional or objective criticism and rectification of immediate goods. If it were articulate, it would say that the same natural processes which generate goods and evils generate also the striving to secure the one and avoid the other, and generate judgments to regulate the strivings. Its weakness is that it fails to recognize that deliberate and systematized science is a precondition of adequate judg¬ ments and hence of adequate striving and adeauate choice.
Its organs of criticism are for the most part half-judg- EXISTENCE AND VALUE ments, uncriticized products of custom, chance circum¬ stance and vested interests. Hence commonsense when it begins to reflect upon its own convictions easily falls a victim to traditional theories; and the vicious circle begins over again. It is sound as to the need and possibility of objective criticism of values, it is weak as to the method of accomplishing.
Yet all this time there is an example of the way out in the case of beliefs. There was a time when beliefs about external events were largely matters of what it was found immediately good to accept or reject; as far as there was a distinction made between the immediately good in belief and the real or true, it lay chiefly in the fact that the latter was the object sanctioned by authorities of church and state. Yet it is now all but commonplace that every belief-value must be subjected to criticism; in scientific undertakings, it is a common-place that criticism does not depend upon reference to a transcendent stand¬ ard truth. The distinction between an immediate belief-value, which is but a challenge to inquiry, and an eventual object of belief that concludes critical inquiry, and has the value of fulfilling the causal relationships discovered, is made in the course of intelligent experi¬ ment. The result is a distinction between the apparent and the real good. Gradually a reluctant world is per¬ suaded that meanings so determined define what is good for acceptance and assertion. Meantime beliefs deter¬ mined by passion, class-interest, routine and authority remain sufficiently prevalent to enforce the perception that it makes all the difference in the world in the value of a belief how its object is formed and arrived at. Thus the lesson is enforced that critical valuations of immediate EXPERIENCE AND NATURE goods proceed in terms of the generation and consequences of objects qualified with good.
In outward forms, experimental science is infinitely varied. In principle, it is simple. We know an object when we know how it is made, and we know how it is made in the degree in which we ourselves make it. Old tradition compels us to call thinking “mental.” But “mental” thought is but partial experimentation, ter¬ minating in preliminary readjustments, confined within the organism. As long as thinking remained at this stage, it protected itself by regarding this introverted truncation as evidence of an immaterial reason superior to and independent of body. As long as thought was thus cooped up, overt action in the “outer” natural scene was inevitably shorn of its full meed of meaning; it was to that extent arbitrary and routine. When “outer” and “inner” activity came together in a single experimental operation, used as the only adequate method of discovery and proof, effective criticism, consistent and ordered valuation, emerged. Thought aligned itself with other arts that shape objects by informing things with meanings.
Psychology, which reflects the old dualistic separation of mind from nature, has made current the notion that the processes which terminate in knowledge fare forth from innocent sensory data, or from pure logical princi¬ ples, or from both together, as original starting points and material. As a natural history of mind this notion is wholly mythological. All knowing and effort to know starts from some belief, some received and asserted mean¬ ing which is a deposit of prior experience, personal and communal. In every instance, from passing query to elaborate scientific undertaking, the art of knowing criti- EXISTENCE AND VALUE cizes a belief which has passed current as genuine coin, with a view to its revision. It terminates when freer, richer and more secure objects of belief are instituted as goods of immediate acceptance. The operation is one of doing and making in the literal sense. Starting from one good, treated as apparent and questionable, and ending in another which is tested and substantiated, the final act of knowing is acceptance and intellectual appreciation of what is significantly conclusive.
Is there any reason for supposing that the situation is any different in the case of other values and valuations? Is there any intrinsic difference between the relation of scientific inquiry to belief- values, of esthetic criticism to esthetic values, and of moral judgments to moral goods? Is there any difference in logical method? If we adopt a current theory, and say that immediate values occur where ever there is liking, interest, bias, it is clear that this liking is an act, if not an overt one, at least a dispositional tendency and direction. But most likings, all likings in their first appearance, are blind and gross. They do not know what they are about nor why they attach them¬ selves to this or that object. Moreover, every such act takes a risk and assumes a liability, and does so ignorantly. For there are always in existence rival claimants for lik¬ ing. To prefer this is to exclude that. Any liking is choice, unwittingly performed. There is no selection without rejection; interest and bias are selective, preferen¬ tial. To take this for a good is to declare in act, though not at first in thought, that it is better than something else. This decision is arbitrary, capricious, unreasoned because made without thought of the other object, and without comparison. To say that an object is a EXPERIENCE AND NATURE good may seem to be an absolute and intrinsic declaration particularly when the assertion is made in direct act rather than in thought. But when we recognize that in effect the assertion is that one thing is better than another thing, the issues shift to something comparative, rela¬ tional, causal, intellectual and objective. Immediately nothing is better or worse than anything else; it is just what it is. Comparison is comparison of things, things in their efficacies, their promotions and hindrances. The better is that which will do more in the way of security, liberation and fecundity for other likings and values.
To make a valuation, to judge appraisingly, is then to bring to conscious perception relations of productivity and resistance and thus to make value significant, intelligent and intelligible. In becoming discriminately aware of the causal conditions of the object liked and preferred, we become aware of its eventual operations. If in the case of esthetic and moral goods, the causal conditions which reflection reveals as determinants of the good object are found to lie within organic constitution in greater degree than is the case with objects of belief, this finding is of enormous importance for the technique of critical judgment. But it does not modify the logic which obtains in knowledge of the relationship of values and valuations to each other. It indicates the particular subject-matter which has to be controlled and used in the conscious art of re-making goods. As inquiries which aim at knowledge start from pre-existent beliefs, so esthetic and moral criticism start from antecedent natural goods of contem¬ plative enjoyment and social intercourse. Its purpose is to make it possible to like and choose knowingly and with meaning, instead of blindly. All criticism worthy of the EXISTENCE AND VALUE EXISTENCE AND VALUE title is but another name for that revealing discovery of conditions and consequences which enables liking, bias, interest to express themselves in responsible and informed ways instead of ignorantly and fatalistically.
The meaning of the theory advanced concerning the relationship of goods and criticism may be illustrated by ethical theory. Few I suppose would deny that in spite of the attention devoted to this subject by many minds of a high order of intention and intellectual equipment, the outcome, judged from the standpoint of scientific consen¬ sus, is rather dismaying. The outcome is due in part to the importance of the subject, its intimate connection with man’s deepest concerns, with his most cherished traditions and with the most acutely perplexing problems of his con¬ temporary social life. Objective detachment and develop¬ ment of adequate intellectual instruments are necessarily difficult under such conditions. But I think that we find, amid all the diversity, one common intellectual precon¬ ception which inevitably defers the possibility of attain¬ ment of scientific method. This is the assumption, implicit or overt, that moral theory is concerned with ends, values rather than with criticism of ends and values; the latter being in fact not only independent of moral theory but not themselves having even moral quality. To dis¬ cover and define once for all the bonum and the summum bonutn in a way which rationally subserves all virtues and duties, is the traditional task of morals; to deny that moral theory has any such office will seem to many equivalent to denial of the possibility of moral philosophy. Y et in other things repeated failure of achievement is regarded as evi¬ dence that we going at the affair in a wrong way. And to a mind willing to surrender the traditional preconception, EXPERIENCE AND NATURE failure to achieve consensus in method and even in generic conclusions in morals as a branch of philosophy may be similarly explained.
It is not meant of course that the tradition assumes that the good and the highest good are created by moral theory. The assumption is not so bad as that; it is to the effect that it is the province of moral theory to reveal moral goods; to bring them to consciousness and to enforce their character in perception. As empirical fact, however, the arts, those of converse and the literary arts which are the enhanced continuations of social converse, have been the means by which goods are brought home to human per¬ ception. The writings of moralists have been efficacious in this direction upon the whole not in their professed intent as theoretical doctrines, but in as far as they have genially participated in the arts of poetry, fiction, parable and drama. Conversion into doctrinal teachings of the imaginative relations of life with which great moral artists have dowered humanity has been the great cause of their ossification into harsh dogmas; illuminating insight into the relations and goods of life has been lost, and an arbitrary code of precepts and rules substituted. Direct appeal of experience concentrated, vivified and intensified by the insight of an artist and embodied in literary creations similar in kind to the revelation of meanings which is the work of any artist, has been treated as a discovery and definition of things true to scientific or philosophic reason.
Meantime the work which theoretical criticism might do has not been done; namely, discovery of the conditions and consequences, the existential relations, of goods which are accepted as goods not because of theory but EXISTENCE AND VALUE because they are such in experience. The cause in large measure is doubtless because the prerequisite tools of physics, physiology and economics were not at hand. But now when these potential instrumentalities are more adequately prepared they will not be employed until it is recognized that the business of moral theory is not at all with consummations and goods as such, but with discovery of the conditions and consequences of their appearance, a work which is factual and analytic, not dialectic, hortatory, nor prescriptive. The argument does not forget that there have been would-be naturalistic and empirical ethics which have asserted that goods are such prior to moral conduct as well as to moral theory, and that they become moral only when employed in conduct as objects of reflective choice and endeavor. But the apparent exception proves the rule. For these forms of moral theory while releasing morals from the obligation of telling man what goods are, leaving that office to life itself, have failed to note that the office of moral philosophy is criticism; and that the performance of this office by discovery of existential conditions and consequences involves a qualitative transformation, a re-making in subsequent action which experimentally tests the conclusions of theory.
Therefore like the Aristotelian ethics, they have been dialectic, defining and classifying in hierarchical order antecedent goods and terminating in a notion of the good, the summum honum; or, like hedonistic ethics, they have made a dialectic abstraction of a feature of concrete goods, their pleasantness; and instead of pro¬ viding a method of analysis of concrete situations have laid down rules of calculation and prescribed policies to EXPERIENCE AND NATURE be pursued as fixed, not intellectually experimental, results of prior calculations. When they were, like Jeremy Bentham, persons of human sensitiveness to evils from which men suffer in virtue of institutions which may be altered; or, like John Stuart Mill, of genial insight into the constituents of a liberal and humane happiness, they have stirred their generation to beneficent action. But the connection between their theories and the practical outcome was adventitious; their ideas operated when all is said and done as literary rather than as scientific apparatus, as much so as in the case of reforms to which Charles Dickens not meanly contributed.
The implications of the position which has been taken import a “practical” element into philosophy as effective and verifiable criticism, obnoxious to the traditional view. Yet if man is within nature, not a little god outside, and is within as a mode of energy inseparably connected with other modes, interaction is the one unescapable trait of every human concern; thinking, even philosophic think¬ ing, is not exempt. This interaction is subject to par¬ tiality because the human factor has bent and bias. But partiality is not obnoxious just because it is partial. A world characterized by qualitative histories with their own beginnings, directions and terminations is of neces¬ sity a world in which any interaction is intensive change — a world of partialities, particulars. What is obnoxious in partiality is due to the illusion that there are states and acts which are not also interactions. Immature and undisciplined mind believes in actions which have their seat and source in a particular and separate being, from which they issue. This is the very belief which the ad¬ vance of intelligent criticism destroys. The latter trans- EXISTENCE AND VALUE EXISTENCE AND VALUE forms the notion of isolated one-sided acts into acknowl¬ edged interactions. The view which isolates knowledge, contemplation, liking, interest, value, or whatever from action is itself a survival of the notion that there are things which can exist and be known apart from active connection with other things.
When man finds he is not a little god in his active powers and accomplishments, he retains his former conceit by hugging to his bosom the notion that nevertheless in some realm, be it knowledge or esthetic contemplation, he is still outside of and detached from the ongoing sweep of inter-acting and changing events; and being there alone and irresponsible save to himself, is as a god. When he perceives clearly and adequately that he is within nature, a part of its interactions, he sees that the line to be drawn is not between action and thought, or action and apprecia¬ tion, but between blind, slavish, meaningless action and action that is free, significant, directed and responsible. Knowledge, like the growth of a plant and the movement of the earth, is a mode of interaction; but it is a mode which renders other modes luminous, important, valuable, cap¬ able of direction, causes being translated into means and effects into consequences.
All reason which is itself reasoned, is thus method, not substance; operative, not “end in itself.” To imagine it the latter is to transport it outside the natural world, to convert it into a god, whether a big and original one or a little and derived one, outside of the contingencies of existence and untouched by its vicissitudes. This is the meaning of the “reason” which is alleged to envisage reality sub specie eternatatis. It is indeed true that all relations, all universals and laws as such are timeless.
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE Even an order of time as an order is timeless, for it is rela¬ tional. But to give irrelevancy to time the name of eter¬ nal in an eulogistic sense, is but to proclaim that irrele¬ vancy to any existence forms a higher kind of existence. Orders, relations, universals are significant and invaluable as objects of knowledge. They are so because they apply to intensive and extensive, individualized, existences; to things of spacious and temporal qualities. Applica¬ tion is not for the sake of something extraneous, for the sake of something designated an utility. It is for the sake of the laws, principles, ideals. Had they not been de¬ tached for the purpose of application, they would not have meaning; intent and potentiality of application in the course of events lends them all their significance. Without actuality of application, without effort to realise their intent, they are meanings, but they possess neither truth nor falsity, since without application they have no bearing and test. Thus they cease to be objects of knowledge, or even reflection; and become detached objects of contemplation. They may then have the es¬ thetic value possessed by the objects of a dream. But after all we have not left temporal experience, human desire, liking, and passion behind or below us. We have merely painted nature with the colors of an all too local and transitory flight from the hardships of life. These eternal objects abstracted from the course of events, although labeled Reality, in opposition to Appearance, are in truth but the idlest and most evanescent of appear¬ ances, born of personal craving and shaped by private fantasy.
Because intelligence is critical method applied to goods of belief, appreciation and conduct, so as to construct, freer and more secure goods, turning assent and assertion EXISTENCE AND VALUE EXISTENCE AND VALUE into free communication of shareable meanings, turning feeling into ordered and liberal sense, turning reaction into response, it is the reasonable object of our deepest faith and loyalty, the stay and support of all reasonable hopes. To utter such a statement is not to indulge in romantic idealization. It is not to assert that intelligence will ever dominate the course of events; it is not even to imply that it will save from ruin and destruction. The issue is one of choice, and choice is always a question of alternatives. What the method of intelligence, thought¬ ful valuation will accomplish, if once it be tried, is for the result of trial to determine. Since it is relative to the intersection in existence of hazard and rule, of contingency and order, faith in a wholesale and final triumph is fan¬ tastic. But some procedure has to be tried: for life is itself a sequence of trials. Carelessness and routine. Olympian aloofness, secluded contemplation are them¬ selves choices. To claim that intelligence is a better method than its alternatives, authority, imitation, caprice and ignorance, prejudice and passion, is hardly an excessive claim. These procedures have been tried and have worked their will. The result is not such as to make it clear that the method of intelligence, the use of science is criticizing and recreating the casual goods of nature into intentional and conclusive goods of art, the union of knowledge and values in production, is not worth trying. There may be those to whom it is treason to think of philosophy as the critical method of developing methods of criticism. But this conception of philosophy also waits to be tried, and the trial which shall approve or condemn lies in the eventual issue. The import of such knowledge as we have acquired and such experience as has been quickened by thought is to evoke and justify the trial.
INDEX ACQUAINTANCE, 329-330.
Activity, See Labor, Practice, Events, Animism, explained, 180-181, 348.
Anthropology, and philosophy, 40- Antinomianism, 147.
A priori, 188.
Appearance, defined, 137-139, and consciousness, 304, See Phenom¬ enal and Consciousness.
Apprehension, 327-332. See Knowl¬ edge.
IX.
Awareness, as perception of meaning, 299, its nature, 304, focal and remaking of meanings, 306-308.
Bergson, H., 50.
Body and Mind, Ch. VII, 301, 322, Brain and Mind, 291, 295.
Choice, influence upon philosophy, Compact, social, 218.
See Esthetic and Appreciation.
Contingent, Nature as, Ch. II, 45, Cosmology, Greek, 90-94, 123-125.
Criticism, 204, 396, 399-400, and Ch. X passim.
£)ATA, sought and taken, not immediate, 22.
Dialectic.
Definition, 330.
Demonstration, two kinds, 10, ancient, Denotation, 10-12 and passim Ch.
Design, as objective, 92.
Dialectic, is empirical, 11, 36, misuse, INDEX Emotion, and art, 390-391.
Experience, as philosophic method, Ch. I, ambiguity, 1, 8, and historic empiricism, 4r-6, and consciousness, 7-8, is method not subject-matter, 11-14, 30, 35, natural classifications, 15, not primarily cognitive, 16-19, nor subjective, 22-26, experienc¬ 40, precarious, Ch. II, “Abso¬ lute,” 59-61, experiment, 70, 135, consummatorv. 78-84, instrumental, 84, Ch. Ill, as p EAR, and the gods, 42.
QESTURE, 175.
Growth, see History.
History and the Historical, 8, 28-29, 207, See Essence.
Ideality, source of, 62-63, 89, 167, Consciousness and Individual.
Induction, 380-381.
Ineffable, 85, See Subject.
Inner Life, 226-230.
Instrumental, 84, 116, Ch. IV, 202- Means, Tool.
Interaction, of events, 271-273 or organism and environment, 282— Interest, and feeling, 256.
INDEX Introspection, 339-340.
Jesperson, 83.
Jurisdiction, 197-199.