f carries us to inarticulate sensation and overwhelming pas¬ sion. For such affairs are the best instances of things that are complete in themselves with no outleadings.
If then rational essences or meanings are better objects of contemplation than are seizures by sensory and pas¬ sionate objects, it is not because the former are fulfill¬ ments of higher or more “real” antecedent processes.
NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES They are not graded on the basis of being lesser or greater actualizations. It is because they present themselves to reflective appraisal as more worthy to be striven for. And this rational character implies that the things which have the better qualities possess also transitiveness, in¬ strumentality, as well as immediacy and finality. They are potential and productive. They lead somewhere, per¬ haps to other affairs having qualities to be envisaged and deeply meditated. If dialectic were not so esthetically enjoyable to some, it would never have played the role it has played in liberating man from the dominion of sensa¬ tion and impulse. This shows that the esthetic object may be useful and an useful one esthetic, or that imme¬ diacy and efficacy1 though distinguishable qualities are not disjoined existentially. But it is no reason for making contemplative knowledge or any other particular affair the highest of all natural ends. Whether the given or the deliberately constructed is a better or higher end is not a question of intrinsic quality, but a matter of reflectively determined judgment. It is conceivable that just because certain objects are immediately good, that which secures and extends their occurrence may itself become for reflec¬ tive choice a supreme immediate good.
1 To avoid misapprehension it should perhaps be explicitly stated the term “efficacy” employed here and elsewhere, does not imply an interpre¬ tation in terms of the old theory of something engaged in emitting force. It is used purely denotatively; it designates empirical position in a course of affairs having a specifiable ending; its meaning is defined not by any theory, but by such affairs as that to get a fire, a match is applied and that it is applied not to a stone but to paper or shavings. The words agency, instrumentality, causal condition, which appear frequently in these pages are to be similarly translated.
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE History is full of ingratitude. All existences are some¬ thing more than products; they have qualities of their own and assert independent life. There is something of King Lear’s daughters in all offspring. This ingratitude is reproachable only when it turns to deny its ancestry. That Plato and Aristotle should have borrowed from the communal objects of the fine arts, from ceremonies, wor¬ ship and the consummatory objects of Greek culture, and should have idealized their borrowings into new objects of art is something to be thankful for. That, after having enforced the loan, they spurned the things from which they derived their models and criteria is not so admirable. This lack of piety concealed from them the poetic and religious character of their own constructions, and established in the classic Western philosophic tradi¬ tion the notions that immediate grasp and incorporation of objects is knowledge; that things are placed in graded reality in accordance with their capacity to afford a cul¬ tivated mind such a grasp or beholding; and that the order of reality in Being is coincident with a predetermined rank of Ends.
If we recognize that all qualities directly had in con¬ scious experience apart from use made of them, testify to nature’s characterization by immediacy and finality, there is ground for unsophisticated recognition of use and enjoy¬ ment of things as natural, as belonging to the things as well as to us. Things are beautiful and ugly, lovely and hateful, dull and illuminated, attractive and repulsive. Stir and thrill in us is as much theirs as is length, breadth, and thickness. Even the utility of things, their capacity to be employed as means and agencies, is first of all not a relation, but a quality possessed; immediately NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES possessed, it is as esthetic as any other quality. If labor transforms an orderly sequence into a means of attaining ends, this not only converts a casual ending into a ful¬ fillment, but it also gives labor an immediate quality of finality and consummation. Art, even fine art, is long, as well as a joy.
From the standpoint of control and utilization, the tendency to assign superior reality to causes is explicable. A “cause” is not merely an antecedent; it is that anteced¬ ent which if manipulated regulates the occurrence of the consequent. This is why the sun rather than night is the causal condition of day. Knowing that consequences will take care of themselves if conditions can be had and managed, an ineradicable natural pragmatism indulges in a cheap and short conversion, and conceives the cause as intrinsically more primary and necessary. This practical tendency is increased by the fact that time is a softener and dignifier; present troubles lose their acuteness when they are no longer present. Old times are proverbially the good old times, and history begins with a Garden of Paradise or a Golden Age. Good, being congenial, is held to be normal; and what is suffered is a. deviation, creating the problem of evil. Thus the earlier gets moral dignity as well as practical superiority. But in existence, or meta¬ physically, cause and effect are on the same level; they are portions of one and the same historic process, each having immediate or esthetic quality and each having efficacy, or serial connection. Since existence is historic it can be known or understood only as each portion is distinguished and related. For knowledge “cause” and “effect” alike have a partial and truncated being. It is as much a part of the real being of atoms that they give rise EXPERIENCE AND NATURE in time, under increasing complication of relationships, to qualities of blue and sweet, pain and beauty, as that they have at a cross-section of time extension, mass, or weight.
The problem is neither psychological nor epistemologi¬ cal. It is metaphysical or existential. It is whether existence consists of events, or is possessed of temporal quality, characterized by beginning, process and ending. If so, the affair of later and earlier, however important it is for particular practical matters, is indifferent to a theory of valuation of existence. It is as arbitrary to assign complete reality to atoms at the expense of mind and conscious experience as it is to make a rigid separation between here and there in space. Distinction is genuine and for some purpose necessary. But it is not a dis¬ tinction of kinds or degrees of reality. Space here is j oined to space there, and events then are joined to events now; the reality is as much in the joining as in the distinction. In order to control the course of events it is indispensable to know their conditions. But to characterize the condi¬ tions, it is necessary to have followed them to some term, which is not fully followed till we arrive at something enjoyed or suffered, had and used, in conscious experi¬ ence. Vital and conscious events exhibit actualization of properties that are not fully displayed in the simpler relationships that are by definition termed physical.
Temporal quality is however not to be confused with temporal order. Quality is quality, direct, immediate and undefinable. Order is a matter of relation, of definition, dating, placing and describing. It is discovered in reflec¬ tion, not directly had and denoted as is temporal quality. Temporal order is a matter of science; temporal quality NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES is an immediate trait of every occurrence whether in or out of consciousness. Every event as such is passing into other things, in such a way that a later occurrence is an integral part of the character or natw& of present exist¬ ence. An “affair”, Res, is always at issue whether it concerns chemical change, the emergence of life, language, mind or the episodes that compose human history. Each comes from something else and each when it comes has its own initial, unpredictable, immediate qualities, and its own similar terminal qualities. The later is never just resolved into the earlier. What we call such resolution is merely a statement of the order by means of which we regulate the passage of an earlier into the later. We may explain the traits of maturity by better knowledge of childhood, but maturity is never just infancy plus.
It is not easy to distinguish between ends as de facto endings, and ends as fulfillments, and at the same time to bear in mind the connection of the latter with the former. We respond so directly to some objects in experience with intent to preserve and perpetuate them that it is diffi¬ cult to keep the conception of a thing as terminus free from the element of deliberate choice and endeavor; when we think of it or discourse about it, we introduce connec¬ tion. Since we turn awav from trouble and suffering, since these things are not the objects of choice and effort save in avoidance, it seems forced to call them ends. To name them such appears an impropriety of language. I am quite willing to concede the linguistic point, provided its implications are acknowledged and adhered to. For in this case we are left, apart from a deliberately directed course of events, only with objects immediately used, enjoyed and suffered but having in themselves no claim EXPERIENCE AND NATURE to the title of ends. Health in this case is not in itself an end of any natural process; much less an end-in-itself. It is an enjoyed good when it happens just as disease is a suffered ill. Similarly, truth of belief and statement is an affair that has the quality of good; but it is not an end just because it is good; it becomes an end only when, because of its goodness, it is actively sought for and reached as a conclusion. On this basis, all ends are ends-in-view; they are no longer ideal as characters of Being, as they were when they were in Greek theory, but are the objects of conscious intent. When achieved in existence they are ends because they are then conclusions attained through antecedent endeavor, just asapostis nota goal in itself, but becomes a goal in relation to a runner and his race. Either we must consistently stick to the equivalence of ends with objectives of conscious endeavor, or admit that all things directly possessed of irreducible and self-sufficing quality, red and blue, pain, solidity, toughness, smoothness and so on through the list, arj^ natural ends.
There is however nothing self-evident, or even clear, in the exclusive identification of ends with ends-in-view and of the latter with psychic states. The identification isolates conscious life from objective nature. It was a particular historic situation that effected the division. Modern science made it clear that nature has no prefer¬ ence for good things over bad things; its mills turn out any kind of grist indifferently. If Greek thought had con¬ tented itself with asserting that all immediacy of exist¬ ence has a certain ultimacy and finality, a certain incom- mensurability and incommutability, if it had cited con¬ scious experience as a striking instance of the indiffer¬ ence of natural processes to termini of good and evil, NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES modern science would have had no destructive impact upon the doctrine of natural ends. It would rather have added resourcefulness to this doctrine. In explicit dis¬ covery of just the conditions antecedent to this good and that bad, it puts in our hands means of regulating the occurrence of things possessed of these qualities. But discovery of the indifference of natural energies to the production of good and bad endings, and the discovery of the over lapping and intermixture of processes leading to different outcomes, so completely overthrew the classic doctrine of ends, that it seemed to abolish any and every conception of natural ends. The logical result was to cut off “consciousness,” as the collectivity of immediate quali-^ ties, from nature, and to create the dualism of physical nature and mind which is the source of modern epistemo¬ logical problems.
A reconsideration of the theory of natural termini, is in historic sequel necessary to a correct envisagement of the connection of conscious life with nature. “Consci¬ ousness” in one of its many significations, is identical with direct apparition, obvious and vivid presence of qualities and of meanings. Take these apparitions as something else than emphatic characters of natural events and physical events, and objects become themselves re¬ mote and uncertain in existence arrived at only through the mediation of consciousness. Moreover, while quality is immediate and absolute, any particular quality is notoriously unstable and transitory. Immediate objects are the last word of evanescence. Consciousness, in the sense just indicated, is flux in which nothing abides. Persistence, “substance” is found only in some unap¬ proachable things, which have to be invoked to supply EXPERIENCE AND NATURE this flux with a substratum and locus. Thus we are con¬ fronted with the perplexing riddles familiar in epistemo¬ logical theory. It suffices at this time to note but one. The realm of immediate qualities contains everything of worth and significance. But it is uncertain, unstable and precarious. The first consideration induces us to prize consciousness supremely; the second leads us to deny reality to it as compared with alleged underlying things with their fixity and permanence. Since immediate quali¬ ties come and go without inherent rhyme and reason, since life is more unstable than inanimate things and conscious life is even more evanescent than life physiologi¬ cally considered, since the coming and going of immediate qualities is susceptible of regulation only through the medium of things out of consciousness, “consciousness” becomes an anomaly. “Matter” as a complex of indirect, not immediately given, and in some sense unknowable, things becomes alone real and solid.
If we discount practical bias toward the regular and repeated, and hence toward “causes” as opposed to con¬ sequences, all that is indicated by the transiency of immediate qualitative affairs is that immediacy is imme¬ diacy. By the nature of the case the occurrence of the immediate is at the mercy of the sequential order. In the case of the things which appeal to common-sense as sub¬ stances, properties like mass and inertia, unchanged solid¬ ity and extension, count most. Rate of change is slow; and presents itself as a matter of attrition and accumula¬ tion; spatial qualities which are static chiefly figure. Time is of comparative indifference to the change of solid substances; a million years is a day. But whatever de¬ pends for its existence upon the interaction of a large NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES number of independent variables is in unstable equilib¬ rium; its rate of change is rapid; successive qualities have no obvious connection with one another; any shift of any part may alter the whole pattern. Thus, while light and water are “substances,” a rainbow, depending upon a highly specialized conjunction of light and vapor, and being transient, is only a “phenomenon.” Such im¬ mediate qualities as red and blue, sweet and sour, tone, the pleasant and unpleasant, depend upon an extraordin¬ ary variety and complexity of conditioning events; hence they are evanescent. They are never exactly redupli¬ cated, because the exact combination of events of which they are termini does not precisely recur. Hence they are even more “phenomenal” than a rainbow; they must be hitched to substance as its “modes” to get standing in “reality.”
Thus the things that are most precious, that are final, being just the things that are unstable and most easily changing, seem to be different in kind from good, solid, old- fashioned substance. Matter has turned out to be nothing like as lumpy and chunky as unimaginative prejudice conceived it to be. But as compared with the changes of immediate qualities it seems in any case solid and sub¬ stantial; a fact which accounts, I suppose, for the inser¬ tion of an immaterial sort of substance, after the analogy of matter-substance, underneath mental affairs. But when it is recognized that the latter are eventual and consummatory to highly complicated interactions of natural events, their transiency becomes itself intelligible; it is no ground of argument for a radical difference from the physical, the latter being also resolvable into a char¬ acter of the course of events. While “consciousness” as EXPERIENCE AND NATURE the conspicuous and vivid presence of immediate qualities and of meanings, is alone of direct worth, things not imme¬ diately present, whose intrinsic qualities are not directly had, are primary from the standpoint of control. For just because the things that are directly had are both precious and evanescent, the only thing that can be thought of is the conditions under which they are had. The common, pervasive and repeated is of superior rank from the standpoint of safeguarding and buttressing the hav¬ ing of terminal qualities. Directly we can do nothing with the latter save have, enjoy and suffer them. So reflection is concerned with the order which conditions, prevents and secures their occurrence. The irony of many historic systems of philosophy is that they have so inverted the actualities of the case. The general, recur¬ rent and extensive has been treated as the worthy and superior kind of Being; the immediate, intensive, transi¬ tory, and qualitatively individualized taken to be of im¬ portance only when it is imputed to something ordinary, which is all the universal can denotatively mean. In truth, the universal and stable are important because they are the instrumentalities, the efficacious conditions, of the occurrence of the unique, unstable and passing.
The system which Aristotle bequeathed to the modern world through Latin Christianity expresses the conse¬ quences of taking the universal which is instrumental, as if it were final. Actually, consummatory objects instead of being a graded series of numerable and unalterable species or kinds of existence ranked under still fewer genera, are infinitely numerous, variable and individualized affairs. Poets who have sung of despair in the midst of prosperity, and of hope amid darkest gloom, have been the true NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES metaphysicians of nature. The glory of the moment and its tragedy will surely pass. The contingent, uncertain and incomplete give depth and scope to consummatory objects while things not directly had, things approach¬ able only through reflective imagination and rational constructions are the conditions of such regulation of their occurrence as is feasible.
The richer and fuller are the terminal qualities of an object the more precarious is the latter, because of its dependence upon a greater diversity of events. At the best, therefore, control is partial and experimental. All prediction is abstract and hypothetical. Given the sta¬ bility of other events, and it follows that, certain condi¬ tions, selected in thought, determine the predictability of the occurrence of say, red. But since the other con¬ ditions do not remain unalterably put, what actually occurs is never just what happens in thought; the thing of mere redness does not happen, but some thing with just this shade and tinge of red, in just this unduplicable con¬ tent. Thus something unpredictable, spontaneous, un- formulable and ineffable is found in any terminal object. Standardizations, formulae, generalizations, principles, universals, have their place, but the place is that of being instrumental to better approximation to what is unique and unrepeatable.
We owe to Romanticism the celebration of this fact; no fact apparently being fully discovered and communi¬ cated save as it is too much celebrated. Aversion to Romanticism as a system is quite justifiable; but even an obnoxious system may hit upon a truth unknown to soberer schemes. Call the facts romantic or by some sweeter sounding name, and it still remains true that EXPERIENCE AND NATURE immediate and terminal qualities (whether or not called conciousness) form an unpredictable and unformulable flow of immediate, shifting, impulsive, adventured finali¬ ties, with respect to which the universal and regular objects and principles celebrated in classic thought are instrumental.
Perhaps we may prudently close this chapter with a reminder. To point out something as a fact is not the same thing as to commend or eulogize the fact. I am not saying that it is a fine and noble thing that whatever is immediately consummatory and precious should be also evanescent and unique, never completely subject to principle and rule. A reporter is not necessarily to blame for the state of thing that he reports. The fact hereby reported is so unescapable and so obvious to a candid empiricist that there is no occasion for either eulogy or condemnation. The only question is what is going to be done about the various instances of it which compose our lives, and give them humor and tragedy. The question is urgent for reflection; it is urgent for the most practical of acts in “getting a living,” where the need to do some¬ thing is constantly imperative. Materials used in reflec¬ tion change even more rapidly than materials employed in meeting hunger and thirst. Their metabolism is at a quicker pace. Genuinely to think of a thing is to think of implications that are no sooner thought of than we are hurried on to their implications. There is no rest for the thinker, save in the process of thinking. Possibly it is for this reason that reflection upon the whole, hag hoen identified in human culture with onerous labor, with the sombre and melancholic. Reverie travels fast, but in reverie the labor of making connections taut and con¬ sistent is not involved. Only in circumstances as for- NATURE, ENDS AND HISTORIES tunate as those of ancient Greece does effort to under¬ stand become a rich and full delight, so that it may be conceived of not only as an end of nature, but as its end of ends, for the sake of which all else happens.
Participation in this consummatory activity has, how¬ ever, been confined to a few. Since it was conceived of as an end given spontaneously or “naturally” to a few, not as a practical and reflective conclusion to be achieved, it was concluded that some men are servile by nature, having as sole function to supply the materials which made it possible for other men to indulge in pure theoretical activity, without distraction by the need of making a living. Thus the conception that thought is the final and complete end of nature became a “rationalization” of an existing division of classes in society. The division of men into the thoughtless and the inquiring was taken to be the intrinsic work of nature; in effect it was identical with the division between workers and those enjoying leisure. Philosophers and scientific inquiries became the utmost acme of nature’s perfection, being the least de¬ pendent upon outward acts and connections.
In a sense, this occurrence of thought and leisurely insight was natural; it happened in the course of natural processes. It was “given.” Like any finality it had to be hit upon, achieved without premeditation before it might become an object of reflective choice and endeavor. But when it came to be reflected upon, its terms were mis¬ conceived. The conception that contemplative thought is the end in itself was at once a compensation for inability to make reason effective in practice, and a means for per¬ petuating a division of social classes. A local and tem¬ poral polity of historical nature became a metaphysics of everlasting being. Thought when it achieves truth EXPERIENCE AND NATURE may, indeed, be said to fulfill the regularities and universali¬ ties of nature; to be their natural end. But its incarna¬ tion as an end in some, not others, does not partake of any universality. It is contingent, accidental; its achieve¬ ment is a rational fulfillment only when it is the product of deliberate arts of politics and education.
Since nothing in nature is exclusively final, rationality is always means as well as end. The doctrine of the uni¬ versality and necessity of rational ends can be validated only when those in whom the good is actualized employ it as a means to modify conditions so that others may also participate in it, and its universality exist in the course of affairs. The more it is asserted that thought and under¬ standing are “ends in themselves,” the more imperative is it that thought should discover why they are realized only in a small and exclusive class. The ulterior problem of thought is to make thought prevail in experience, not just the results of thought by imposing them upon others, but the active process of thinking. The ultimate contra¬ diction in the classic and genteel tradition is that while it made thought universal and necessary and the culmin¬ ating good of nature, it was content to leave its distribu¬ tion among men a thing of accident, dependent upon birth, economic, and civil status. Consistent as well as hu¬ mane thought will be aware of the hateful irony of a philosophy which is indifferent to the conditions that determine the occurrence of reason while it asserts the ultimacy and universality of reason. In as far as quali¬ ties of objects are found worthy of finality, the finding must eventuate in arts. Only thereby will thinking and knowing take their full place as events falling within natural processes, not only in their origin but also in their outcome.