the celebration. Any excuse serves for a holiday and the more the holiday is decked out with things that contrast with the pressure of workaday life while re-enacting its form, the more a holiday it_is. The more unrestrained the play of fancy the greater the contrast. The super¬ natural has more thrills than the natural, the customary; holidays and holy-days are indistinguishable. Death is an occasion for a wake, and mourning is acclaimed with board of funeral meats.
Reflected upon, this phase of experience manifests objects which are final. The attitude involved in their appreciation is esthetic. The operations entering into their production is fine art, distinguished from useful art. It is dangerous however to give names, especially in discourse that is far aloof from the things named — direct enjoyment of the interplay of the contingent and the effec¬ tive, purged of practical risks and penalties. Esthetic, fine art, appreciation, drama have an eulogistic flavor. We hesitate to call the penny-dreadful of fiction artistic, so we call it debased fiction or a travesty on art. Most sources of direct enjoyment for the masses are not art to the cultivated, but perverted art, an unworthy indulgence. Thu(s we miss the point. A passion of anger, a dreamy relaxation of the limbs after effort, swapping of jokes, horse-play, beating of drums, blowing of tin whistles, explosion of firecrackers and walking on stilts, have the same quality of immediate and absorbing finality that is possessed by things and acts dignified by the title of esthejjc. For man is more preoccupied with enhancing life than with bare living; so that a sense of living when it attends labor and utility is borrowed not intrinsic, having been generated in those periods of relief when activity was dramatic.
NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES 81 To say these things is only to say that man is naturally more interested in-Consumm ationg_ than he is in prepara¬ tions; and that consummations have first to be hit upon spontaneously and accidentally — as the baby gets food and all of us are warmed by the sun — before they can be objects of foresight, invention and industry. Conscious¬ ness so far as it is not dull ache and torpid comfort is a thing of the imagination. The extensions and trans¬ formations of existence generated in imagination may come at last to attend work so as to make it significant and agreeable. But when men are first at the height of busi¬ ness, they are too busy to engage either in fancy or reflective inquiry. At the outset the hunt was enjoyed in the feast, or in the calm moments of shaping spears, bows and arrows. Only later was the content of these experiences carried over into hunting itself, so that even its dangers might be savored. Labor, through its structure and order, lends play its pattern and plot; play then returns the loan with interest to work, in giving it a sense of beginning, sequence and climax. As long as imagined objects are satisfying, the logic of drama, of suspense, thrill and success, domi¬ nates the logic of objective events. Cosmogonies are mythological not because savages indulge in defective scientific explanations, but because objects of imagination are consummatory in the degree in which they exuber¬ antly escape from the pressure of natural surroundings, even when they re-enact its crises. The congenial is first form of the consistent.
As Goldenweiser says, if supernaturalism prevails in early culture it is largely because, “the phantasmagoria of supernaturalism is esthetically attractive, it has beauty of thought and form and of movement, it abounds in delight- 82 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE ful samples of logical coherence, and is full of fascination for the creator, the systematizer and the beholder.” And it is safe to add, that the esthetic character of logical coherence rather than its tested coherence with fact is th at which yields the delight. Again speaking of the place of ceremonialism in early culture, Goldenweiser well char¬ acterizes it as a kind of “psychic incandescence;” because of its presence, there is “no cooling of the ever glowing mass (the conglomerate of customs) no flagging of the emotions, no sinking of the cultural associations to the more precarious level of purely ideational connections.”
Modern psychiatry as well as anthropology have dem¬ onstrated the enormous role of symbolism in hurjran experience. The word symbolism, however, is a product of reflection upon direct phenomena, not a description of what happens when so-called symbols are potent. For the feature which characterizes symbolism is precisely that the thing which later reflection calls a symbol is not a symbol, but a direct vehicle, a concrete embodiment, a vital incarnation. To find its counterpart we should betake ourselves not to signal flags which convey informa¬ tion, ideas and direction, but to a national flag in moments of intense emotional stir of a devout patriot. Symbolism in this sense dominates not only all early art and cult but social organization as well. Rites, designs, patterns are all charged with a significance which we may call mystic, -^but which is immediate and direct to those who have and celebrate them. Be the origin of the totem what it may, it is not a cold, intellectual sign of a social organiza¬ tion; it is that organization made present and visible, a centre of emotionally charged behavior. It is not other¬ wise with the symbolism uncovered in dreams and NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES 83 neurotic states by psychological analysis. Such symbols are not indicative or intellectual signs; they are condensed substitutes of actual things and events, which embody actual things with more direct and enhanced import than do the things themselves with their distractions, imposi¬ tions, and irrelevances. Meanings are intellectually dis¬ torted and depressed, but immediately they are height¬ ened and concentrated.
Jesperson speaks of the origin of language in similar terms. He says that many linguistic philosophers appear to “imagine our primitive ancestors after their own image as serious and well meaning men, endowed with a large share of common sense. They leave you with the impression that these first framers of speech were sedate citizens with a strong interest in the purely business and matter of fact aspects of life.” But Jesper¬ son finds that the prosaic side of early culture was capable only “of calling forth short monosyllabic interjections; they are the most immutable portions of language, and remain now at essentially the same standpoint as thous¬ ands of years ago.” He concludes that the “genesis of language is found...in the poetic side of life; the source of speech is not gloomy seriousness, but merry play and youthful hilarity.” And no one would deny, I suppose that literature rather than business and science has developed and fixed our present linguistic resources.
It would be difficult to find a fact more significant of the traits of nature, more instructive for a naturalistic meta¬ physics of existence, than this cleavage of the things of human experience into actual but hard objects, and enjoyed but imagined objects. One might think that philosophers in their search for some datum that possesses 84 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE properties that put it beyond doubt, might have directed their attention to this direct phase of experience, in which objects are not a matter of sensations, ideas, beliefs or knowledge, but are something had and enjoyed. All that “self-evidence” can intelligibly mean is obviousness of presence; commonplaces like human interest in the things of sport and celebration are the most conspicuously obvious of all. In comparison, the “self-evident” things of philosophers are recondite and technical.
The other roost self-evident thing in experience is use¬ ful labor and its coercive necessity. As direct apprecia¬ tive enjoyment exhibits things in their consummatory phase, labor manifests things in their connections of things with one another, in efficiency, productivity, fur¬ thering, hindering, generating, destroying. From _ the standpoint of enjoyment a thing is what it directly does forjas. From that of labor a thing is what it will do to other things — the only way in which a tool or an obstacle can be defined. Extraordinary and subtle reasons havg been assigned for belief in the principle of causation. Labor and the use of tools seem, however, to be a sufficient empirical reason: indeed, to be the only empirical events that can be specifically pointed to in this connection. They are more adequate grounds for acceptance of belief in causality than are the regular sequences of nature or than a category of reason, or the alleged fact of will. The first thinker who proclaimed that eve.ry_i something and cause of ular existence is both conditioned and condition, merely put into words the procedure of the workman, converting a mode of practice into a formula. External regularity is familiar, customary, taken for granted, not thought of, NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES 85 embodied in thoughtless routine. Regularity, orderly sequence, in productive labor presents itself to thought as a controlling principle. Industrial arts are the type- forms of experience that bring to light the sequential connections of things with one another.
In contrast, the enjoyment (with which suffering is to be classed) of things is a declaration that natural exist¬ ences are not mere passage ways to another passage way, and so on ad infinitum. Thinkers interested in esthetic experience are wont to point out the absurdity of the idea that things are good or valuable only for something else; they dwell on the fact vouchsafed by esthetic appreciation that there are things that have their goodness or value in themselves, which are not cherished for the sake of any¬ thing else. These philosophers usually confine this obser¬ vation however to human affairs isolated from nature, which they interpret exclusively in terms of labor, or causal connections. But in every event there is some¬ thing obdurate, self-sufficient, wholly immediate, neither a relation nor an element in a relational whole, but termi¬ nal and exclusive. Here, as in so many other matters, materialists and idealists agree in an underlying meta¬ physics which ignores in behalf of relations and relational systems, those irreducible, infinitely plural, undefinable and indescribable qualities which a thing must have in order to be, and in order to be capable of becoming the subject of relations and a theme of discourse. Immediacy of existence is ineffable. But there is nothing mystical about such ineffability; it expresses the fact that of direct existence it is futile to say anything to one’s self and impossible to say anything to another. Discourse can but intimate connections which if followed out may lead 86 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE one to have an existence. Things in their immediacy are unknown and unknowable, not because they are remote or behind some impenetrable veil of sensation of ideas, ^ but because knowledge has no concern with them. For knowledge is a memorandum of conditions of their appear¬ ance, concerned, that is, with sequences, coexistences, relations. Immediate things may be pointed ta bv words, but not described or defined. Description when it occurs is but a part of a circuitous method of pointing or denot¬ ing; index to a starting point and road which if taken may lead to a direct and ineffable presence. To the em¬ pirical thinker, immediate enjoyment and suffering are the conclusive exhibition and evidence that nature has its finalities as well as its relationships.
Many modern thinkers, influenced by the notion that knowledge is the only mode of experience that grasps things, assuming the ubiquity of cognition, and noting that immediacy or qualitative existence has no place in authentic science, have asserted that qualities are always and only states of consciousness. It is a reasonable belief that there would be no such thing as “consciousness” if events did not have a phase of brute and unconditioned “isness,” of being just what they irreducibly are. Con¬ sciousness as sensation, image and emotion is thus a par¬ ticular case of immediacy occurring under complicated conditions. And also without immediate qualities those relations with which science deals, would have no footing in existence and thought would have nothing beyond itself to chew upon or dig into. Without a basis in qualitative events, the characteristic subject-matter of knowledge would be algebraic ghosts, relations that do not relate. To dispose of things in which relations terminate by call- NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES 87 ing them elements, is to discourse within a relational and logical scheme. Only if elements are more than just elements in a whole, only if they have something qualita¬ tively their own, can a relational system be prevented from complete collapse.
The Greeks were more naive than we are. Their thinkers were as much dominated by the esthetic charac¬ ters of experienced objects as modern thinkers are by their scientific and economic (or relational) traits. Con¬ sequently they had no difficulty in recognizing the im¬ portance of qualities and of things inherently closed or final. They thought of mind as a realization of natural existence or a participation in it. Thus they were saved from the epistemological problem of how things and mind, defined antithetically, can have anything to do with each other. If existence in its immediacies could speak it would proclaim, “I may have relatives but I am not related.” In esthetic objects, that is in all immediately enjoyed and suffered things, in things directly possessed, they thus speak for themselves; Greek thinkers heard their voice.
Unfortunately however, these thinkers were not con¬ tent to speak as artists, of whom they had a low opinion. Since they were thinkers, aiming at truth or knowledge, they put art on a lower plane than science; and the only enjoyment they found worth serious attention was that of objects of thought. In consequence they formulated a doctrine in which the esthetic and the rational are con¬ fused on principle, and they bequeathed the confusion as an intellectual tradition to their successors. Aristotle, spoke more truly than he was aware when he said that philosophy began in leisure “when almost all the neces- 88 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE saries and things that make for comfort and recreation were present.’ ’ For it was philosophic, rather than scien¬ tific “knowledge” which thus began. Philosophy was a telling of the story of nature after the style of all congenial stories, a story with a plot and climax, given such coher- ent properties as would render it congenial to minds demanding that objects satisfy logical canons.
Objects are certainly none the worse for having wonder and admiration for their inspiration and art for their medium. But these objects are distorted when their affiliation with the epic, temple and drama is denied, and ^ there is claimed for them a rational and cosmic status independent of piety, drama and story. In the classic philosophy of Greece the picture of the world that was constructed on an artistic model proferred itself as being the result of intellectual study. A story composed in the interests of a refined type of enjoyment, ordered by the needs of consistency in discourse, or dialectic, became cosmology and metaphysics. Its authors took toward art and rite much the same sort of superior attitude that the modern esthete takes to vulgar forms of esthetic satisfaction. A claim for superiority in subject matter and mode of artistic treatment was indeed legitimate; but a claim was made for difference in kind. Art was an embellished imitation of the everyday or empirical affairs of life in their natural setting; philosophy was science, an envisagement of realities behind all copies, all phenomena; or a grasp of essences within them forming their valid substance. The delight attending the insight was attrib¬ uted to the final intrinsic dignity of the cosmic objects perceived by reason, instead of being frankly recognized to be due to a selection and arrangement of things .with a view to enhancement of tranquil enjoyment.
NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES 89 Devotion to rites, stories and revery springs on its magical side from practical desire to control the contin¬ gent; but in larger measure it embodies the happiness that attends the sense of successful issue from the uncertainly hazardous. Imagination is primarily dramatic, rather than lyric, whether it takes the form of the play enacted on the stage, of the told story or silent soliloquy. The constant presence of instability and trouble gives depth and poignancy to the situations in which are pictured their subordination to final issues possessed of calm and cer¬ tainty. To re-enact the vicissitudes, crises and tragedies of life under conditions that deprive them of their oyeit^ dangers, is the natural r61e of “consciousness,” which is tamed to respect actualities only when circumstance enforces the adoption of the method of labor, a discipline that is fortunate if it retain some of the liberation from immediate exigencies which characterizes dramatic imagination.
Modern critics of esthetics have criticized the concep-1^ tion of Plato and Aristotle that art is imitation. But in its original statement, this conception was a description of the observed facts of drama, music and epic rather than theoretical interpretation. For these thinkers were not so stupid as to hold that art is an imitation of inert things; they held that it was a mimesis of the critical and climatic behavior of natural forces within human career and des¬ tiny. Such a reproduction is naturally in a new and liberal medium; it permits idealization, but the idealiza¬ tion is of natural events. It is self-sufficing, an end in itself, while the events seem to exist only to render the perfection of an idealized reproduction possible and per¬ tinent. Resort to esthetic objects is the spontaneous 90 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE human escape and consolation in a trying and difficult world. A world that consisted entirely of stable objects directly presented and possessed would have no esthetic qualities; it would just be, and would lack power to satisfy and to inspire. Objects are actually esthetic when they turn hazard and defeat to an issue which is above and beyond trouble and vicissitude. Festal celebration and congummatorv delights belong only in a world that knows risk and hardship.
Greek philosophy as well as Greek art is a memorial of the joy in what is finished, when it is found amid a world of unrest, struggle, and uncertainty in what, since it js ended, does not commit us to the uncertain hazards of. what js stillgoing on • Without such experiences as those of Greek art it is hardly conceivable that the craving for the passage of change into rest, of the contingent, mixed and wandering into the composed and total, would have found a model after which to design a universe like the cosmos of Platonic and Aristotelian tradition. Form was the first and last word of philosophy because it had been that of art; form is change arrested in a prerogative object. It conveys a sense of the imperishable and time- less, although the material in which it is exemplified is subject to decay and contingency. It thus conveys an intimation of potentialities completely actualized in a happier realm, where events are not events, but are arrested and brought to a close in an eternal self-sustain¬ ing activity. Such a realm is intrinsically one of secure and self-possessed meaning. It consists of objects of immediate enjoyment hypostasized into transcendent reality. Such was the conversion of Greek esthetic con¬ templation effected by Greek reflection.
NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES 91 The technical structure of the resulting metaphysics is familiar. The cosmically real is one with the finished, the perfect, or wholly done. Even with Aristotle, a coldly defining theory, called metaphysics, of the traits of Being, becomes a theology, or science of ultimate and eternal reality to which only ecstatic predicates are at¬ tributable. It consists of pure forms, self-sufficient, self- enclosed and self-sustaining; self-movement or life at eternal full- tide. Forms are ideal, and the ideal is the rational apprehended by reason. The material for this point of view was found empirically in what is consum- matory and final; and the dominion exercised by art in Greek culture fostered and enhanced attention to objects of this immediately enjoyed kind. To the spectator, artistic objects are given; they need only to be envisaged; Greek reflection, carried on by a leisure class in the inter¬ est of liberalizing leisure, was preeminently that of the spectator, not that of the participator in processes of pro¬ duction. Labor, production, did not seem to create form, it dealt with matter or changing things so as to furnish an occasion for incarnation of antecedent forms in matter. To artisans form is alien, unperceived and unenjoyed; absorbed in laboring with material, they live in a world of change and matter, even when their labors have an end in manifestation of form. Plato was so troubled by the consequences of this ignorance of form on the part of all who live in the world of practice, industrial and political, that he elaborated a plan by which their activities might be regulated by those who, above labor and entanglement in change and practice, provide in laws forms to shape the habits of those who work. Aristotle escaped the dilemma by putting nature above art, and endowing nature with 92 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE skilled purpose that for the most part achieves ends or completions. Thus the r61e of the human artisan whether in industry or politics became relatively negligible, and the miscarriages of human art a matter of relative insignificance.
The Aristotelian conception of four-fold “causation” is openly borrowed from the arts, which for the artisan are utilitarian and menial, and are “fine” or liberal only for the cultivated spectator who is possessed of leisure — that is, is relieved from the necessity of partaking labo¬ riously in change and matter. Nature is an artist that works from within instead of from without. Hence all change, or matter, is potentiality for finished objects. Like other artists, nature first possesses the forms which it afterwards embodies. When arts follow fixed models, whether in making shoes, houses, or dramas, and when the element of individual invention in design is condemned as caprice, forms and ends are necessarily external to the individual worker. They preceded any particular realiza¬ tion. Design and plan are anonymous and universal, and carry with them no suggestion of a designing, purpo¬ sive mind. Models are objectively given and have only to be observed and followed. Thus there was no diffi¬ culty, such as one may feel to-day, in ascribing definite and regulative forms to the changes of nature, which are actualized in objects that are finalities, closures of change. The actualization in an organic body of the forms that are found in things constitutes mind as the end of nature.
Their immediate possession and celebration constitutes consciousness, as far as the idea of consciousness is found in Greek thought.
NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES 93 This doctrine was not an arbitrary speculation; it flowed naturally from the fact that Greek thinkers were fortunate to find ready-made to hand and eye a realm of esthetic objects with traits of order and proportion, form and finality. The arts were pursued upon the basis of a fund of realized, objective and impersonal designs and plans, which were prior to individual devising and execu¬ tion rather than products of individual purpose and inven¬ tion. The philosophers did not create out of their own speculations, the idea of materials subdued to the accept¬ ance and manifestation of objective forms. They found the fact in the art of their period, translating it into an intellectual formula. Philosophers were not the authors of an identification of objects informed with ideal order and proportion with a final and arresting outcome of proc¬ esses of antecedent change. That identification was at least implicit in the operation of artisans. Nor were the philosophers the originators of the idea that mental appro¬ priation of some objects is intrinsically a state of elevated satisfaction. That fact was given to them in the esthetic culture of their civilization. What the philosophers are responsible for is a peculiar one-sided interpretation