of these empirical facts, an interpretation, however, which has its roots in features, although less admirable ones, of Greek culture.
For the Greek community was marked by a sharp separation of servile workers and free men of leisure.
which meant a division between acquaintance with matters of fact and contemplative appreciation, be¬ tween unintelligent practice and unpractical intelli¬ gence, between affairs of change and efficiency — or instru¬ mentality — and of rest and enclosure — finality. Exper- 94 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE ience afforded therefore no model for a conception of experimental inquiry and of reflection efficacious in action. In consequence, the sole notability, intelligibility, of nature was conceived to reside in objects that were ends? since they set limits to change. Changing things were not capable of being known on the basis of relationship to one another, but only on the basis of their relationship to objects beyond change, because marking its limit, and immediately precious. The terminal objects lent changing objects the properties which made them knowable; such stability of character as they possessed was derived from the form of the end-objects toward which they moved. Hence an inherent appetition or nisus toward these terminal and static objects was attributed to them. The whole scheme of cosmic change was a vehicle for attaining ends possessed of properties which caused them to be objects of attraction of all lesser things, rendering the latter uneasy and restless until they attained the end- object which constitutes their real nature. Thus an immediate contemplative possession and enjoyment of objects, dialectically ordered, was interpreted as defining both true knowledge and the highest end and good of nature. A doctrine of morals, of what is better in reflec¬ tive choice, was thus converted into a metaphysics and science of Being, the moral aspect being disguised to the modern mind by the fact that the highest good was conceived esthetically, instead of in the social terms which upon the whole dominate modern theories of morality.
The doctrine that objects as ends are the proper objects of science, because they are the ultimate forms of real being, met its doom in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Essences and forms were attacked NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES 95 as occult; “final causes” were either -wholly denied _or relegated to a divine realm too high for human knowledge.
The doctrine, of natural ends was displaced by a doctrine of designs. ends-in-view. conscious aims constructed and entertained in individual minds independent of nature.
Descartes, Spinoza and Kant are upon this matter at least in agreement with Bacon, Hume and Helvetius. The imputation to natural events of cosmic appetition towards ends, the notion that their changes were to be understood as efforts to reach a natural state of rest and perfection, were indicated as the chief source of sterility and fantasy in science; the syllogistic logic connected with the doctrine was discarded as verbal, polemical, and at its best irrelevant to the subtle operations of nature; purpose and contingency were alike relegated to the purely human and personal; nature was evacuated of qualities and became a homogeneous mass differentiated by differ¬ ences of homogeneous motion in a homogeneous space. Mechanical relations, which Greek thought had rejected as equivalent to the chaotic reign of pure accident, be¬ came the head corner-stone of the conception of law, of uniformity and order. If ends were recognized at all, it was only under the caption of design, and design was defined as conscious aim rather than as objective order and architechtonic form. Wherever the influence of modern physics penetrated, the classic theory became remote, faded, factitious, with its assertion that natural changes are inherent movements toward objects which are their fulfillments or perfections, so that the latter are true objects of knowledge, supplying the forms or charac¬ ters under which alone changes may be known. With the decay of this doctrine, departed also belief in cosmic 96 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE qualitative differences and kinds, so that of necessity quality and immediacy had no recourse, expelled from ob¬ jective nature, save to take refuge inpersonal consciousness.
Is this reversal of classic theories of existence inevitable? Must belief in ends involved in nature itself be sur¬ rendered, or be asserted only by means of a roundabout examination of the nature of knowledge which starting from conscious intent to know, finally infers that the uni¬ verse is a vast, non-natural fulfillment of a conscious intent? Or is there an ingredient of truth in ancient meta¬ physics which may be extracted and re-affirmed? Empiri¬ cally, the existence of objects of direct grasp, possession, use and enjoyment cannot be denied. Empirically, things are poignant, tragic, beautiful, humorous, settled, dis¬ turbed, comfortable, annoying, barren, harsh, consoling, splendid, fearful; are such immediately and in their own right and behalf. If we take advantage of the word esthetic in a wider sense than that of application to the beautiful and ugly, esthetic quality, immediate, final or self-enclosed, indubitably characterizes natural situa¬ tions as they empirically occur. These traits stand in themselves on precisely the same level as colors, sounds, qualities of contact, taste and smell. Any criterion that finds the latter to be ultimate and “hard” data will, impartially applied, come to the same conclusion about the former. Any quality as such is final; it is at once initial and terminal; just what it* is as it exists. It may be referred to other things, it may be treated as an effect or as a sign. But this involves an extraneous extension and use. It takes us beyond quality in its immediate qualitativeness. If experienced things are valid evidence, then nature in having qualities within NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES 97 itself has what in the literal sense must be called ends, terminals, arrests, enclosures.
It is dangerous to venture at all upon the use of the word “ends” in connection with existential processes. Apologetic and theological controversies cluster about ^ it and affect its signification. Barring this connotation, the word has an almost inexpugnable honorific flavor, so that to assert that nature is characterized by ends, the most conspicuous of which is the life of mind, seems like engaging in an eulogistic, rather than an empirical account of nature. Something much more neutral than any such implication is, however, meant. We con¬ stantly talk about things coming or drawing to a close; getting ended, finished, done with, over with. It is a commonplace that no thing lasts forever. We may be glad or we may be sorry but that is wholly a matter of the kind of history which is being ended. We may conceive the end, the close, as due to fulfillment, perfect attain¬ ment, to satiety, or to exhaustion, to dissolution, to some¬ thing having run down or given out. Being an end may be indifferently an ecstatic culmination, a matter-of-fact consummation, or a deplorable tragedy. Which of these things a closing or terminal object is, has nothing to do with the property of being an end.
The genuine implications of natural ends may be brought out by considering beginnings instead of endings. To insist that nature is an affair of beginnings is to assert that there is no one single and all-at-once beginning of everything. It is but another way of saying that nature is an affair of affairs, wherein each one, no matter how linked up it may be with others, has its own quality. It does not imply that every beginning marks an advance or 98 EXPERIENCE AND NATURE improvement; as we sadly know accidents, diseases, wars, lies and errors, begin. Clearly the fact and idea of begin¬ ning is neutral, not eulogistic; temporal, not absolute. And since wherever one thing begins something else ends, what is true of beginnings is true of endings. Popular fiction and drama shows the bias of human nature in favor of happy endings, but by being fiction and drama they show with even greater assurance that unhappy endings are natural events.
To minds inured to the eulogistic connotation of ends, such a neutral interpretation of the meaning of ends as has just been set forth may seem to make the doctrine of ends a matter of indifference. If ends are only endings or closings of temporal episodes, why bother to call attention to ends at all, to say nothing of framing a theory of ends and dignifying it with the name of natural teleology? In the degree, however, in which the mind is weaned from partisan and ego-centric interest, acknowledgement of nature as a scene of incessant beginnings and endings, presents itself as the source of philosophic enlightenment. It enables thought to apprehend causal mechanisms and temporal finalities as phases of the same natural processes, instead of as competitors where the gain of one is the loss of the other. Mechanism is the order involved in an historic occurrence, capable of definition in terms of the order which various histories sustain to each other. Thus it is the instrumentality of control of any particular termination since a sequential order involves the last term.
The traditional conception of natural ends was to the effect that nature does nothing in vain; the accepted meaning of this phrase was that every change is for the NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES 99 sake of something which does not change, occurring in its behalf. Thus the mind started with a ready-made list of good things or perfections which it was the business of nature to accomplish. Such a view may verbally distin¬ guish between something called efficient causation and something else called final causation. But in effect the distinction is only between the causality of the master who contents himself with uttering an order and the efficacy of the servant who actually engages in the physical work of execution. It is only a way of attributing ulti¬ mate causality to what is ideal and mental — the directive order of the master —, while emancipating it from the supposed degradation of physical labor in carrying it out, as well as avoiding the difficulties of inserting an immaterial cause within the material realm. But in a legitimate ac¬ count of ends as endings, all directional order resides in the sequential order. This no more occurs for the sake of the end than a mountain exists for the sake of the peak which is its end. A musical phrase has a certain close, but the earlier portion does not therefore exist for the sake of the close as if it were something which is done away with when the close is reached. And so a man is not an adult until after he has been a boy, but childhood does not exist for the sake of maturity.
By the nature of the case, causality, however it be defined, consists in the sequential order itself, and not in a last term which as such is irrelevant to causality, although it may, of course be, in addition, an initial tenn in another sequential order. The view held — or implied — by some “mechanists”, which treats an initial term as if it had an inherent generative force which it somehow emits and bestows upon its successors, is all of a piece with the view EXPERIENCE AND NATURE held by teleologists which implies that an end brings about its own antecedents. Both isolate an event from the history in which it belongs and in which it has its character. Both make a factitiously isolated position in a temporal order a mark of true reality, one theory select¬ ing initial place and the other final place. But in fact causality is another name for the sequential order itself; and since this is an order of a history having a begin¬ ning and end, there is nothing more absurd than setting causality over against either initiation or finality.
The same considerations permit a naturalistic inter¬ pretation of the ideas of dynamic and static. Every end is as such static; this statement is but a truism; chang¬ ing into something else, a thing is obviously transitive, not final. Yet the thing which is a close of one history is always the beginning of another, and in this capacity the thing in question is transitive or dynamic. This state¬ ment also is tautology, for dynamic does not mean pos¬ sessed of “force” or capable of emitting it so as to stir up other things and set them in motion; it means simply change in a connected series of events. The traditional view of force points necessarily to something transcen¬ dental, because outside of..events, whether called God or Will or The Unknowable. So the traditional view of the static points to something fixed and rigid, incapable of change, and therefore also outside the course of things and consequently non-empirical. Empirically, however, there is a history which is a succession of histories, and in which any event is at once both beginning of one course and close of another; is both transitive and static. The phrase constantly in our mouths, “state of affairs” is accurately descriptive, although it makes sheer nonsense in both NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES the traditional spiritual and mechanistic theories. There are no changes that do not enter into an affair, Res, and there is no affair that is not bounded and thereby marked off as a state or condition. When a state of affairs is perceived, the perceiving-of-a-state-of-affairs is a further state of affairs. Its subject-matter is a thing in the idiomatic sense of thing, res, whether a solar-system, a stellar constellation, or an atom, a diversified and more or less loosely interconnection of events, falling within boundaries sufficiently definite to be capable of being approximately traced. Such is the unbiased evidence of experience in gross, and such in effect is the conclusion of recent physics as far as a layman can see. For this rea¬ son, and not because of any unique properties of a separ¬ ate kind of existence, called psychic or mental, every situation or field of consciousness is marked hv initiation. direction or intent, and consequence or import. What is unique is not these traits, but the property of awareness or perception. Because of this property, the initial stage is capable of being judged in the: light of its probable course and consequence. There is anticipation. Each successive event being a stage in a serial process is both expectant and commemorative. What is more precisely pertinent to our present theme, the terminal outcome when anticipated (as it is when a moving cause of affairs is perceived) becomes an end-in-view, an. aim, purpose. a prediction usable as a plan in shaping the course of events. In classic Greek thought, the perception of ends was simply an esthetic contemplation of the forms of ob¬ jects in which natural processes were completed. In most modern thought, it is an arbitrary creation of private mental operations guided by personal desire, the theoreti- EXPERIENCE AND NATURE cal alternative being that they are finite copies of the fulfilled intentions of an infinite mind. In empirical fact. they are projections of possible, consequences; they are ends-in-view. The in-viewness of ends is as much con¬ ditioned by antecedent natural conditions as is percep¬ tion of contemporary objects external to the organism, trees and stones, or whatever. That is, natural processes must have actually terminated in specifiable consequences, which give those processes definition and character, before ends can be mentally entertained and be the objects of striving desire. In so far, we must side with Greek thought. But empirical ends-in-view are distinguished in two important respects from ends as they are conceived in classic thought. They are not objects of contemplative possession and use, but are intellectual and regulative means, degenerating into reminiscences or dreams unless they are employed as plans within the state of affairs. And when they are attained, the objects which they inform are conclusions and fulfillments, only as these objects are the consequence of prior reflection, deliberate choice and directed effort are they fulfillments, conclusions, comple¬ tions, perfections. A natural end which- occurs without the intervention of human art is a terminus, a de facto boundary, but it is not entitled to any such honorific status of completions and realizations as classic meta¬ physics assigned them.
When we regard conscious experience, that is to say, the object and qualities characteristic of conscious life, as a natural end, we are bound to regard all objects impartially as distinctive ends in the Aristotelian sense. We cannot pick or choose; when we do pick and choose we are obvi¬ ously dealing with practical ends — with objects and quali- NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES ties that are deemed worthy of selection by reflective, deliberate choice. These “ends” are not the less natural, if we have an eye to the continuity of experienced objects with other natural occurrences, but they are not ends without the intervention of a special affair, reflective sur¬ vey and choice. But popular thought, in accord with the Greek tradition, picks and chooses among all ends those which it likes and honors, at the same time ignoring and implicitly denying the act of choice. T.ike those who regard a happy escape from a catastrophe as a providen¬ tial intervention, neglecting all who have not escaped. popular teleology regards good. obiejcts_Ji&Jiatural_ends, bad objects and qualities being regarded as mere acci¬ dents or incidents, regrettable mechanical excess or defect. Popular teleology like Greek metaphysics, has accord¬ ingly been apologetic, justificatory of the beneficenc.e_of nature; it has been optimistic in a complacent wav.
Primitive man like naive common sense imputes ter¬ minating qualities to nature — in which it follows a. sound realistic metaphysics. But it also imputes to them the property of causal determination, an imputation rejected hv science. Rejection by science does not prove these qualities to be mere “subjective” or “private” appearances; it only shows that they are termini, closings of serial events. Events that achieve and possess them are linked, mediatory, transitive, indicative, and the proper material of knowledge. From the standpoint of causal sequence, or the order with which science is con¬ cerned, qualities are superfluous, irrelevant and immater¬ ial. We could never predict their occurrence from the fullest acquaintance with the properties that form the objects of knowledge as such.
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE From the standpoint of the latter, the relational orders, ends are abrupt and interruptive. Hence to a philosophy that takes the subject-matter of knowledge to be exclusive and exhaustive — as so much of modern philosophy has done — they form a most perplexing problem, a mystery. For with extrusive and superfluous status they combine the property of being permeating and absorbing. They alone, as we say, are of interest, and they are the cause of taking interest in other things. For living creatures they form the natural platform for regarding other things. They are the basis, directly and indirectly, of active response to things. As compared with them, other things are obstacles and means of procuring and avoiding the occurrence of situations having them. When the word “consciousness” is — as it often is — used for a short name for the sum total of such immediate qualities as actually present themselves, it is the end or terminus of natural events. As such it is also gratuitous, superfluous and inexplicable when reality is defined in terms of the rela¬ tional objects of science.
By “ends” we also mean ends-in-view, aims, things viewed after deliberation as worthy of attainment and as evocative of effort. They are formed from objects taken in their immediate and terminal qualities; objects once having occurred as endings, but which are not now in existence and which are not likely to come into existence save by an action which modifies surroundings. Classic metaphysics is a confused union of these two sense of ends, the primarily natural and the secondarily natural, or practical, moral. Each meaning is intelligible, grounded, legitimate in itself. But their mixture is one of the Great Bads Of philosophy. For it treats as natural ends apart NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES from reflection just those objects that are worthy and excellent to reflective choice. Popular teleology has un¬ knowingly followed the leadings that controlled Greek thought; spiritualistic quasi- theological metaphysics has consciously adopted the latter’s point of view.
The features of this confused metaphysics are: First, elimination from the status of natural ends of all objects that are evil and troublesome; Secondly, the grading of objects selected to constitute natural ends into a fixed, unchangeable hierarchical order. Objects that possess and import qualities of struggle, suffering and defeat are regarded not as ends, but as frustrations of ends, as accidental and inexplicable deviations. Theology has resorted to an act of original sin to make their occurrence explicable, Greek metaphysics resorted to the presence in nature of a recalcitrant, obdurate, factor. To this pro- vincially exclusive view of natural termini, popular teleo¬ logy adds a ranking of objects according to which some are more completely ends than others, until there is reached an object which is only end, never eventful and temporal — the end. The hierarchy is explicit in Greek thought: first, and lowest are vegetative ends, normal growth and reproduction; second in rank, come animal ends, locomotion and sensibility; third in rank, are ideal and rational ends, of which the highest is blissful contem¬ plative possession in thought of all the forms of nature. In this gradation, each lower rank while an end is also means or preformed condition of higher ends. Empiri¬ cal things, things of useful arts, belonging to the second class but, affected by an adventitious mixture of thought, are ultimately instrumentalities potential for the life of pure rational possession of ideal objects. Modern teleo- EXPERIENCE AMD NATURE logies are much less succinct and definite, they agree how¬ ever in the notion of rows of inferior ends which prepare for and culminate in something which is the end.
Such a classificatory enterprise is naturally consoling to those who enjoy a privileged status, whether as philoso¬ phers, as saints or scholars, and who wish to justify their special status. But its consoling apologetics should not blind us to the fact that to think of objects as more or less ends is nonsense. They either have immediate and terminal quality; or they do not: quality as such is absolute not comparative. A thing may be of some shade of blue when compared with some quality that is wanted and striven for; but its blue is not itself more or less blue nor than blueness, and so with the quality of being terminal and absorbing. Objects may be more or less absorptive and arresting and thus possess degrees of intensity with respect to finality. But this difference of intensity is not, save as subject to reflective choice, a distinction in rank or class of finality. It applies to different toothaches as well as to different objects of thought; but it does not apply, inherently, to the difference between a tooth-ache and an ideal object — save that a thing like a tooth-ache is often possessed of greater intensity of finality. If we follow the clew of the latter fact, we shall probably conclude that search for pure and unalloyed finality