and volitional states for cognitive sensory states. But need and desire are exponents of natural being. They are, if we use Aristotelian phraseology, actualizations of its contingencies and incompletenesses; as such nature itself is wistful and pathetic, turbulent and passionate. Were it not, the existence of wants would be a miracle. In a world where everything is complete, nothing requires any¬ thing else for its completion. A world in which events can be carried to a finish only through the coinciding assistance of other transitory events, is already necessi¬ tous, a world of begging as well as of beggarly elements. If human experience is to express and reflect this world, it must be marked by needs; in becoming aware of the needful and needed quality of things it must project satis¬ factions or completions. For irrespective of whether a satisfaction is conscious, a satisfaction or non-satisfac¬ tion is an objective thing with objective conditions. It means fulfillment of the demands of objective factors. Happiness may mark an awareness of such satisfaction, and it may be its culminating form. But satisfaction is not subjective, private or personal: it is conditioned by objective partialities and defections and made real by objective situations and completions.
By the same logic, necessity implies the precarious and contingent. A world that was all necessity would not be a world of necessity; it would just be. For in its being, nothing would be necessary for anything else. But where some things are indigent, other things are necessary if demands are to be met. The common failure to note the fact that a world of complete being would be a world in which necessity is meaningless is due to a rapid shift from one universe of discourse to another. First we EXISTENCE 65 EXISTENCE 65 postulate a whole of Being; then we shift to a part; now since a “part” is logically dependent as such in its exis¬ tence and its properties, it is necessitated by other parts. But we have unwittingly introduced contingency in the very fact of marking off something as just a part. If the logical implications of the original notion are held to firmly, a part is already a part-of-a-whole. Its being what it is, is not necessitated by the whole or by other parts: its being what it is, is just a name for the whole being what it is. Whole and parts alike are but names for existence there as just what it is. But wherever we can say if so-and-so, then something else, there is necessity, because partialities are implied which are not just parts- of-a-whole. A world of “ifs” is alone a world of “musts” — the “ifs” express real differences; the “musts” real con¬ nections. The stable and recurrent is needed for the ful¬ fillment of the possible; the doubtful can be settled only through its adaptation to stable objects. The necessary is always necessary for, not necessary in and of itself; it is conditioned by the contingent, although itself a condition of the full determination of the latter.
One of the most striking phases of the history of philosophic thought is the recurrent grouping together of unity, permanence (or “the eternal”), completeness and rational thought, while upon another side full multi¬ plicity, change and the temporal, the partial, defective, sense and desire. This division is obviously but another case of violent separation of the precarious and unsettled from the regular and determinate. One aspect of it however, is worthy of particular attention: the connection of thought and unity. Empirically, all reflection sets out from the problematic and confused. Its aim is to 66 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE clarify and ascertain. When thinking is successful, its career closes in transforming the disordered into the orderly, the mixed-up into the distinguished or placed, the unclear and ambiguous into the defined and unequivocal, the disconnected into the systematized. It is empirically assured that the goal of thinking does not remain a mere ideal, but is attained often enough so as to render reasona¬ ble additional efforts to achieve it.
In these facts we have, I think, the empirical basis of the philosophic doctrines which assert that reality is really and truly a rational system, a coherent whole of relations that cannot be conceived otherwise than in terms of in¬ tellect. Reflective inquiry moves in each particular case from differences toward unity; from indeterminate and ambiguous position to clear determination, from confusion and disorder to system. When thought in a given case has reached its goal of organized totality, of definite rela¬ tions of distinctly placed elements, its object is the ac¬ cepted starting point, the defined subject matter, of further experiences; antecedent and outgrown conditions of dark¬ ness and of unreconciled differences are dismissed as a transitory state of ignorance and inadequate apprehen¬ sions. Retain connection of the goal with the thinking by which it is reached, and then identify it with true reality in contrast with the merely phenomenal, and the outline of the logic of rational and “objective” idealisms is before us. Thought like Being, has two forms, one real; the other phenomenal. It is compelled to take on reflective form, it involves doubt, inquiry and hypothesis, because it sets out from a subject-matter conditioned by sense, a fact which proves that thought, intellect, is not pure in man, but restricted by an animal organism that EXISTENCE 67 is but one part linked with other parts, of nature. But the conclusion of reflection affords us a pattern and guarantee of thought which is constitutive; one with the system of objective reality. Such in outline is the pro¬ cedure of all ontological logics.
A philosophy which accepts the denotative or empirical method accepts at full value the fact that reflective think¬ ing transforms confusion, ambiguity and discrepancy into illumination, definiteness and consistency. But it also points to the contextual situation in which thinking occurs. It notes that the starting point is the actually problematic, and that the problematic phase resides in some actual and specifiable situation.
It notes that the means of converting the dubious into the assured, and the incomplete into the determinate, is use of assured and established things, which are just as empirical and as indicative of the nature of experienced things as is the uncertain. It thus notes that thinking is no different in kind from the use of natural materials and energies, say fire and tools, to refine, re-order, and shape other natural materials, say ore. In both cases, there are matters which as they stand are unsatisfactory and there are also adequate agencies for dealing with them and connecting them. At no point or place is there any jump outside empirical, natural objects and their rela¬ tions. Thought and reason are not specific powers. They consist of the procedures intentionally employed in the application to each other of the unsatisfactorily con¬ fused and indeterminate on one side and the regular and stable on the other. Generalizing from such observa¬ tions, empirical philosophy perceives that thinking is a continuous process of temporal re-organization within one 68 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE and the same world of experienced things, not a jump from the latter world into one of objects constituted once for all by thought. It discovers thereby the empirical basis of rational idealism, and the point at which it empirically goes astray. Idealism fails to take into account the specified or concrete character of the uncertain situation in which thought occurs; it fails to note the empirically concrete nature of the subject-matter, acts, and tools by which determination and consistency are reached; it fails to note that the conclusive eventual objects having the latter properties are themselves as many as the situations dealt with. The conversion of the logic of reflection into an ontology of rational being is thus due to arbitrary conversion of an eventual natural function of unification into a causal antecedent reality; this in turn is due to the tendency of the imagination working under the influence of emotion to carry unification from an actual, objective and experimental enterprise, limited to particular situations where it is needed, into an un¬ restricted, wholesale^ jmovement which ends in an all- absorbing dream.
The occurrence of reflection is crucial for dualistic metaphysics as well as for idealistic ontologies. Re- flection occurs only in situations qualified by uncertainty, alternatives, questioning, search, hypotheses, tentative trials or experiments which test the worth of thinking. A naturalistic metaphysics is bound to consider reflection as itself a natural event occurring wiMn nature because of traits of the latter. It is bound to inference from the em¬ pirical traits of thinking in precisely the same w'ay as the sciences make inferences from the happening of suns, radio-activity, thunder-storms or any other natural event.
EXISTENCE 69 EXISTENCE 69 Traits of reflection are as truly indicative or evidential of the traits of other things as are the traits of these events. A theory of the nature of the occurrence and career of a sun reached by denial of the obvious traits of the sun, or by denial that these traits are so connected with the traits of other natural events that they can be used as evidence concerning the nature of these other things, would hardly possess scientific standing. Yet philoso¬ phers, and strangely enough philosophers who call them¬ selves realists, have constantly held that the traits which are characteristic of thinking, namely, uncertainty,. ambiguity, alternatives, inquiring, search, selection, ex- perimental reshaping of external conditions, do not pos¬ sess the same existential character as do the objects of valid knowledge. They have denied that these traits are evidential of the character of the world within which thinking occurs. They have not, as realists, asserted that these traits are mere appearances; but they have often asserted and implied that such things are only personal or psychological in contrast with a world of objective nature. But the interests of empirical and denotative method and of naturalistic metaphysics wholly coincide. The world must actually be such as to generate ignorance and in¬ quiry; doubt and hypothesis, trial and temporal con- clusions; the latter being such that they develop out of existences which while wholly “real” are not as satis¬ factory, as good, or as significant, as those into which they are eventually re-organized. The ultimate evidence of genuine hazard, contingency, irregularity and indeter¬ minateness in nature is thus found in the occurrence of thinking. Thp traits of natural existence which prpnpratp the, fears and adorations of superstitious bar- 70 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE barians generate the scientific procedures of disciplined civilization. The superiority of the latter does not con¬ sist in the fact that they are based on “real” existence, while the former depend wholly upon a human nature different from nature in general. It consists in the fact that scientific inquiries reach objects which are better, because reached by method which controls them and which adds greater control to life itself, method which mitigates accident, turns contingency to account, and releases thought and other forms of endeavor.
The conjunction of problematic and determinate characters in nature renders every existence, as well as every idea and human act, an experiment in fact, even though not in design. To be intelligently experimental is but to be conscious of this intersection of natural conditions so as to profit by it instead of being at its mercy. The Christian idea of this world and this life as a probation is a kind of distorted recognition of the situation; distorted because it applied wholesale to one stretch of existence in contrast with another, regarded as original and final. But in truth anything which can exist at any place and at any time occurs subject to tests imposed upon it by surroundings, which are only in part compatible and reinforcing. These surroundings test its strength and measure its endurance. As we can dis¬ course of change only in terms of velocity and accelera¬ tion which involve relations to other things, so assertion of the permanent and enduring is comparative. The stablest thing we can speak of is not free from conditions set to it by other things. That even the solid earth mountains, the emblems of constancy, appear and dis¬ appear like the clouds is an old theme of moralists and EXISTENCE 71 EXISTENCE 71 poets. The fixed and unchanged being of the Demo- critean atom is now reported by inquirers to possess some of the traits of his non-being, and to embody a temporary equilibrium in the economy of nature’s compromises and adjustments. A thing may endure secula seculorum and yet not be everlasting; it will crumble before the gnawing tooth of time, as it exceeds a certain measure. Every existence is an event.
This fact is nothing at which to repine and nothing to gloat over. It is something to be noted and used. If it k discomfiting when applied to good things, to ourfngnds, possessions and precious selves, it is consoling also to know that, no evil endures forever; that the longest jane turns sometime, and that the memory of loss of nearest and dearest grows dim in time. The eventful character of all existences is no reason for consigning them to the realm of mere appearance any more than it is a reason for idealizing flux into a deity. The important thing is measure, relation, ratio, knowledge of the comparative tempos of change. In mathematics some variables are constants in some problems; so it is in nature and life. The rate of change of some things is so slow, or is so rhythmic, that these changes have all the advantages of stability in dealing with more transitory and irregular happenings — if we know enough. Indeed, if any one thing that concerns us is subject to change, it is fortunate that all other things change. A thing “absolutely” stable and unchangeable would be out of the range of the principle of action and reaction, of resistance and leverage as well as of friction. Here it would have no applicabil¬ ity, no potentiality of use as measure and control of other events. To designate the slower and the regular 72 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE rhythmic events structure, and more rapid and irregular ones process, is sound practical sense. It expresses the function of one in respect to the other.
But spiritualistic idealism and materialism alike treat this relational and functional distinction as something fixed and absolute. One doctrine finds structure in a framework of ideal forms, the other finds it in matter. They agree in supposing that structure has some super¬ lative reality. This supposition is another form taken by preference for the stable over the precarious and un¬ completed. The fact is that all structure is structure of something; anything defined as structure is a character of events, not something intrinsic and per se. A set of traits is called structure, because of its limiting function in relation to other traits of events. A house has a structure; in comparison with the disintegration and collapse that would occur without its presence, this struc¬ ture is fixed. Yet it is not something external to which the changes involved in building and using the house have to submit. It is rather an arrangement of changing events such that properties which change slowly, limit and direct a series of quick changes and give them an order which they do not otherwise possess. Structure is con¬ stancy of means, of things used for consequences, not of things taken by themselves or absolutely. Structure is what makes construction possible and cannot be dis¬ covered or defined except in some realized construction, construction being, of course, an evident order of changes. The isolation of structure from the changes whose stable ordering it is, renders it mysterious — something that is metaphysical in the popular sense of the word, a kind of ghostly queerness.
EXISTENCE 73 The^ “matter’ ’ of materialists and the “spirit” of idealists is a creature similar to the constitution of the United States in the minds of unimaginative persons.
Obviously the real constitution is certain basic relation¬ ships among the activities of the citizens of the country; it is a property or phase of these processes, so connected with them as to influence their rate and direction of change. But by literalists it is often conceived of as something external to them; in itself fixed, a rigid framework to which all changes must accommodate themselves. Similarly what we call matter is that character of natural events which is so tied up with changes that are sufficiently rapid to be perceptible as to give the latter a characteristic rhythmic order, the causal sequence. It is no cause or source of events or processes; no absolute monarch; no principle of explanation; no substance behind or under¬ lying changes — save in that sense of substance in which a man well fortified with this world’s goods, and hence able to maintain himself through vicissitudes of surround¬ ings, is a man of substance. The name designates a character in operation, not an entity.
That structure, whether of the kind called material or of the kind summed up in the word mental, is stable or permanent relationally and in its office, may be shown in another way. There is no action without reaction; there is no exclusively one-way exercise of conditioning power, no mode of regulation that operates wholly from above to below or from within outwards or from without inwards. Whatever influences the changes of other things is itself changed. The idea of an activity proceeding only in one direction, of an unmoved mover, is a survival of Greek physics. It has been banished from science, but 74 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE remains to haunt philosophy. The vague and mysterious properties assigned to mind and matter, the veiy con¬ ceptions of mind and matter in traditional thought, are ghosts walking underground. The notion of matter ac¬ tually found in the practice of science has nothing in com¬ mon with the matter of materialists — and almost every¬ body is still a materialist as to matter, to which he merely adds a second rigid structure which he calls mind. The matter of science is a character of natural events and changes as they change; their character of regular and stable order.
Natural events are so complex and varied that there is nothing surprising in their possession of different characterizations, characters so different that they can be easily treated as opposites.
I Nothing but unfamiliarity stands in the way of thinking of both mind and matter as different characters of natural events, in which matter expresses their sequential order, and mind the order of their meanings in their logical connections and dependencies. Processes may be event¬ ful for functions which taken in abstract separation are at opposite poles, just as physiological processes eventuate in both anabolic and katabolic functions. The idea that matter and mind are two sides or “aspects” of the same things, like the convex and the concave in a curve. is_ literally unthinkable. J A curve is an intelligible object and concave and convex are defined in terms of this object; they are indeed but names for properties involved in its meaning. We do not start with convexity and concavity as two independent things and then set up an unknown tertium quid to unite two disparate things. In spite of the literal absurdity of EXISTENCE 75 the comparison, it may be understood however in a way which conveys an inkling of the truth. That to which both mind and matter belong is the complex of events that constitute nature. This becomes a mysterious tertiwn quid, incapable of designation, only when mind and matter are taken to be static structures instead of functional characters. It is a plausible prediction that if there were an interdict placed for a generation upon the use of mind, matter, consciousness as nouns, and we were obliged to employ adjectives and adverbs, conscious and consciously, mental and mentally, material and physically, we should find many of our problems much J simplified.
We have selected only a few of the variety of the illustrations that might be used in support of the idea that the significant problems and issues of life and philosophy concern the rate and mode of the conjunction of the pre¬ carious and theassured, the incomplete and the finished, the repe titious and the varying, the safe and sane and the haz¬ ardous. If we trust to the evidence of experienced things, these traits, and the modes and tempos of their inter¬ action with each other, are fundamental features of natural existence. The experience of their various conse¬ quences, according as they are relatively isolated, unhap¬ pily or happily combined, is evidence that wisdom, and hence that love of wisdom which is philosophy, is concerned with choice and administration of their proportioned union. Structure and process, substance and accident, matter and energy, permanence and flux, one and many, continuity and discreteness, order and progress, law and liberty, uniformity and growth, tradition and innovation, rational will and impelling desires, proof and discovery, the 76 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE actual and the possible, are names given to various phases of their conjunction, and the issue of living de¬ pends upon the art with which these things are adjusted to each other.
While metaphysics may stop short with noting and registering these traits, man is not contemplatively de¬ tached from them. They involve him in his perplexities and troubles, and are the source of his joys and achieve¬ ments. The situation is not indifferent to man, because it forms man as a desiring, striving, thinking, feeling creature. It is not egotism that leads man from contem¬ plative registration of these traits to interest in managing them, to intelligence and purposive art. Interest, think¬ ing, planning, striving, consummation and frustration are a drama enacted by these forces and conditions. A particular choice may be arbitrary; this is only to say that it does not approve itself to reflection. But choice is not arbitrary, not in a universe like this one, a world which is not finished and which has not consistently made up its mind where i t is going and what it is going to do. Or, if we call it arbitrary, the arbitrariness is not ours but that of existence itself. And to call existence arbitrary or by any moral name, whether disparaging or honorific, is to patronize nature. To assume an attitude of con¬ descension toward existence is perhaps a natural human compensation for the straits of life. But it is an ulti¬ mate source of the covert, uncandid and cheap in philos¬ ophy. This compensatory disposition it is which forgets that reflection exists to guide choice and effort. Hence its love of wisdom is but an unlaborious transformation of existence by dialectic, instead of an opening and en¬ larging of the ways of nature in man. A true wisdom.
EXISTENCE 77 devoted to the latter task, discovers in thoughtful ob- servation and experiment the method of administering the unfinished processes of existence so that frail goods shall be substantiated, secure goods be extended, and the pre- carious promises of good that haunt experienced things be more liberally fulfilled.
CHAPTER THREE Nature, Ends and Histories Human experience in the large, jn its coarse and con- spicuous features, has for one of its most striking features preoccupation with direct enjoyment, feasting and festivi¬ ties; ornamentation, dance, song, dramatic pantomine. telling yarns and enacting stories. In comparison with intellectual and moral endeavor, this trait of experience has hardly received the attention from philosophers that it demands. Even philosophers who have conceived that pleasure is the sole motive of man and the attainment of happiness his whole aim, have given a curiously sober, drab, account of the working of pleasure and the search for happiness. Consider the utilitarians how they toiled, spun and wove, but who never saw man arrayed in joy as the lilies of the field. Happiness was to them a matter of calculation and effort, of industry guided by mathematical book-keeping. The history of man shows however that man takes his enjoyment neat, and at as short range as possible.
Direct appropriations and satisfactions were prior to anything but the most elementary and exigent prudence, just as the useful arts preceeded the sciences. The body is decked before it is clothed. While homes are still hovels, temples and palaces are embellished. Luxuries prevail over necessities except when necessities can be festally celebrated. Men make a game of their fishing and hunting, and turn to the periodic and disciplinary labor of agriculture only when inferiors, women and slaves, NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES 79 cannot be had to do the work. Useful labor is, whenever possible, transformed bv ceremonial and ritual accompani¬ ments. subordinated to art that yields immediate enjoy - mentj otherwise it is attended to under the compulsion of circumstance during abbreviated surrenders of leisure. For leisure permits of festivity, in revery, ceremonies and conversation. The pressure of necessity is, however, never wholly lost, and the sense of it led men, as if with utieasy conscience at their respite from work, to impute practical efficacy to play and rites, endowing them with power to coerce events and to purchase the favor of rulers of events.
But it is possible to magnify the place of magical_exer- cise and superstitious legend. The primary interest lies in staging the show and enjoying the spectacle, in giving plav to the ineradicable interest in stories which illustrate the contingencies of existence combined with happier endings for emergencies than surrounding conditions often permit. It was not conscience that kept men loyal to cults and rites, and faithful to tribal myths. So far as it was not routine, it was enjoyment of the drama of life without the latter’s liabilities that kept melvifrom decay. Interest in rites as means of influencing the course _of things, and the cognitive or explanation office of myths were hardly more than an embroidery, repeating in pleasant form the pattern which inexpugnable necessities imposed upon practice. When rite and myth are sponta¬ neous rehearsal of the impact and career of practical needs and doings, they must also seem to have practical force. The political significance of July Fourth, 1776, is ence Day, but this effect hardly accounts for the fervor of 80 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE