The belief that these orders of relation, which are the appropriate object of science, are therefore the sole ultimately “real” objects is the source of that assertion of a symmetrical dovetailed and completed universe made by both traditional materialism and idealism. The belief is due to neglect of the fact that such relations are always relations of ongoing affairs characterized by be¬ ginnings and endings which mark them off into unstable individuals. Yet this neglected factor is empirically so EXPERIENCE AND NATURE | pervasive and conspicuous that it has to be acknowledged in some form; it is usually acknowledged in a backhanded way — and one which confuses subsequent re¬ flection — by attributing all qualities inconsistent with nature thus defined to “finite” mind, in order to account for ignorance, doubt, error and the need of inference and inquiry.
If nature is as finished as these schools have defined it to be, there is no room or occasion in it for such a mind; it and the traits it is said to possess are literally supernatural or at least extra-natural.
A realist may deny this particular hypothesis that, existentially, mind designates an instrumental method of directing natural changes. But he cannot do so in virtue of his realism; the question at issue is what the real is. If natural existence is qualitatively individualized or genu¬ inely plural, as well as repetitious, and if things have both temporal quality and recurrence or uniformity, then the more realistic knowledge is, the more fully it will reflect and exemplify these traits. Science seizes upon whatever is so uniform as to make the changes of nature rhythmic, and hence predictable. But the contingencies of nature make discovery of these uniformities with a view to prediction needed and possible. Without the uniformities, science would be impossible. But if they alone existed, thought and knowledge would be impossible and meaningless. The incomplete and un¬ certain gives point and application to ascertainment of regular relations and orders. These relations in them¬ selves are hypothetical, and when isolated from applica¬ tion are subject-matter of mathematics (in a non-existential sense). Hence the ultimate objects of science are guided processes of change.
Sometimes the use of the word “truth” is confined to designating a logical property of propositions; but if we extend its significance to designate character of existen¬ tial reference, this is the meaning of truth: processes of change so directed that they achieve an intended con¬ summation. Instrumentalities are actually such only in operation; when they operate, an end in- view is in process of actualization. The means is fully a means only in its end. The instrumental objects of science are completely themselves only as they direct the changes of nature toward a fulfilling object. Thus it may be said intelligibly and not as mere tautology that the end of science is knowledge, implying that knowledge is more than science, being its fruit.
Knowledge is a word of various meanings. Etymologi¬ cally, “science” may signify tested and authentic in¬ stance of knowledge. But knowledge has also a mean¬ ing more liberal and more humane. It signifies events understood, events so discriminately penetrated by thought that mind is literally at home in them. It means comprehension, or inclusive reasonable agreement. What is sometimes termed “applied” science, may then be more truly science than is what is conventionally called pure science. For it is directly concerned with not just instrumentalities, but instrumentalities at work in ef¬ fecting modifications of existence in behalf of conclusions that are reflectively preferred. Thus conceived the char¬ acteristic subject-matter of knowledge consists of fulfilling objects, which as fulfillments are connected with a history to which they give character. Thus conceived, knowledge exists in engineering, medicine and the social arts more adequately than it does in mathematics, and physics.
Thus conceived, history and anthropology are scientific in a sense in which bodies of information that stop short with general formulae are not.
“Application” is a hard word for many to accept. It suggests some extraneous tool ready-made and complete, which is then put to uses that are external to its nature. To call the arts applications of science is then to introduce something foreign to the sciences which the latter irrel¬ evantly and accidentally serve. Since the application is in human use, convenience, enjoyment and improve¬ ment, this view of application as something external and arbitrary reflects and strengthens the theories which detach man from nature, which, in the language of philosophy, oppose subject and object. But if we free ourselves from preconceptions, application of “science” means application in, not application to. Application in something signifies a more extensive interaction of natural events with one another, an elimination of dis¬ tance and obstacles; provision of opportunities for in¬ teractions that reveal potentialities previously hidden and that bring into existence new histories with new initia¬ tions and endings. Engineering, medicine, social arts realize relationships that were unrealized in actual exist¬ ences. Surely in their new context the latter are under¬ stood or known as they are not in isolation. Prejudice against the abstract, as something remote and technical, is often irrational; but there is sense in the conviction that in the abstract there is something lacking which should be recovered. The serious objection to “applied” science lies in limitation of the application, as to private profit and class advantage.
“Pure” science is of necessity relational and abstract: it fulfills its meaning and gains full truth when included within a course of concrete events. The proposition that “pure” science is non-existential is a tacit admission that only “applied” science is existential. Something else than history and anthropology lose all scientific standing when standards of “purity” are set up as ulti¬ mate; namely, all science of existential events. There is superstitious awe reflected in the current estimate of science. If we could free ourselves from a somewhat abject emotion, it would be clear enough that what makes any proposition scientific is its power to yield un¬ derstanding, insight, intellectual at-homeness, in connec¬ tion with any existential state of affairs, by filling events with coherent and tested meanings. The case of history is typical and basic. Upon the current view, it is a waste of time to discuss whether there can be such a thing as a science of history. History and science are by definition at opposite poles. And yet if all natural existences are histories, divorce between history and the logical mathematical schemes which are the appropriate objects of pure science, terminates in the conclusion that of existences there is no science, no adequate knowledge. Aside from mathematics, all knowledge is historic; chemistry, geology, physiology, as well as anthro¬ pology and those human events to which, arrogantly, we usually restrict the title of history. Only as science is seen to be fulfilled and brought to itself in intelligent management of historical processes in their continuity can man be envisaged as within nature, and not as a supernatural extrapolation. Just because nature is what it is, history is capable of being more truly known — understood, intellectually realized — than are mathe¬ matical and physical objects. Do what we can, there always remains something recondite and remote in the latter, until they are restored in the course of affairs from which they have been sequestrated. While the humanizing of science contributes to the life of humanity, it is even more required in behalf of science, in order that it may be intelligible, simple and clear; in order that it may have that correspondence with reality which true knowl¬ edge claims for itself.
One can understand the sentiment that animates the bias of scientific inquirers against the idea that all science is ultimately applied. It is justified in the sense in which it is intended; for it is directed against two conceptions which are harmful, but which, also, are irrelevant to the position here taken. One of these conceptions is that the concern or personal motive of the inquirer should be in each particular inquiry some specific practical applica¬ tion. This is just as it happens to be. Doubtless many important scientific discoveries have been thus instigated, but that is an incident of human history rather than of scientific inquiry as such. And upon the whole, or if this animating interest were to become general, the undoubted effect is limitation of inquiry and thereby in the end of the field of application. It marks a recurrence to the dogma of fixed predetermined ends, while emancipation from the influence of this dogma has been the chief service rendered modern scientific methods.
The evil thus effected is increased by the second notion, namely, that application is identical with “commercialized” use. It is an incident of human history, and a rather appalling incident, that applied science has been so largely made an equivalent of use for private and economic class purposes and privileges. When inquiry is narrowed by such motivation or interest, the consequence is in so far disastrous both to science and to human life. But this limitation does not spring from nor attach to the conception of “application” which has been just presented. It springs from defects and perversions of morality as that is embodied in institutions and their effects upon personal disposition. It may be questioned whether the notion that science is pure in the sense of being concerned ex¬ clusively with a realm of objects detached from human concerns has not conspired to reinforce this moral de¬ ficiency. For in effect it has established another classinterest, that of intellectualists and aloof specialists. And it is of the nature of any class-interest to generate and con¬ firm other class-interests, since division and isolation in a world of continuities are always reciprocal. The institu¬ tion of an interest labelled ideal and idealistic in isolation tends of necessity to evoke and strengthen other interests lacking ideal quality. The genuine interests of “pure” science are served only by broadening the idea of appli¬ cation to include all phases of liberation and enrichment of human experience.
CHAPTER FIVE Nature, Communication and Meaning Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful. That things should be able to pass from the plane of exter¬ nal pushing and pulling to that of revealing themselves to man, and thereby to themselves; and that the fruit of communication should be participation, sharing, is a wonder by the side of which transubstantiation pales. When communication occurs, all natural events are sub¬ ject to reconsideration and revision; they are re-adapted to meet the requirements of conversation, whether it be public discourse or that preliminary discourse termed thinking. Events turn into objects, things with a mean¬ ing. They may be referred to when they do not exist, and thus be operative among things distant in space and time, through vicarious presence in a new medium. Brute efficiencies and inarticulate consummations as soon as they can be spoken of are liberated from local and acci¬ dental contexts, and are eager for naturalization in any non-insulated, communicating, part of the world. Events when once they are named lead an independent and double life. In addition to their original existence, they are subject to ideal experimentation: their meanings may be infinitely combined and re-arranged in imagination, and the outcome of this inner experimentation — which is thought — may issue forth in interaction with crude or raw events. Meanings having been deflected from the rapid and roaring stream of events into a calm and traversible canal, rejoin the main stream, and color, temper and compose its course. Where communication exists, things in acquiring meaning, thereby acquire represen¬ tatives, surrogates, signs and implicates, which are infi¬ nitely more amenable to management, more permanent and more accommodating, than events in their first estate.
By this fashion, qualitative immediacies cease to be dumbly rapturous, a possession that is obsessive and an incorporation that involves submergence: conditions found in sensations and passions. They become capable of survey, contemplation, and ideal or logical elaboration; when something can be said of qualities they are purveyors of instruction. Learning and teaching come into being, and there is no event which may not yield information. A directly enjoyed thing adds to itself meaning, and en¬ joyment is thereby idealized. Even the dumb pang of an ache achieves a significant existence when it can be designated and descanted upon; it ceases to be merely oppressive and becomes important; it gains importance, because it becomes representative; it has the dignity of an office.
In view of these increments and transformations, it is not surprising that meanings, under the name of forms and essences, have often been hailed as modes of Being beyond and above spatial and temporal existence, invul¬ nerable to vicissitude; nor that thought as their posses¬ sion has been treated as a non-natural spiritual energy, disjoined from all that is empirical. Yet there is a natural bridge that joins the gap between existence and essence; namely communication, language, discourse. Failure to acknowledge the presence and operation of natural interaction in the form of communication creates the gulf between existence and essence, and that gulf is factitious and gratuitous.
The slight respect paid to larger and more pervasive kinds of empirical objects by philosophers, even by pro¬ fessed empiricists, is apparent in the fact that while they have discoursed so fluently about many topics they have discoursed little about discourse itself. Anthropologists, philologists and psychologists have said most that has been said about saying. Nevertheless it is a fact of such distinction that its occurrence changed dumb creatures — as we so significantly call them — into thinking and know¬ ing animals and created the realm of meanings. Speak¬ ing from the standpoint of anthropology Franz Boas says: “The two outer traits in which the distinction between the minds of animals and man finds expression are the exist¬ ence of organized articulate speech in man and the use of utensils of varied application.”1 It is antecedently prob¬ able that sole external marks of difference are more than external; that they have intimate connection with such intrinsic differences as religion, art and science, industry and politics. “Utensils” were discussed in the last chap¬ ter, in connection with the useful arts and knowledge, and their indispensable relation with science pointed out. But at every point appliances and application, uten¬ sils and uses, are bound up with directions, suggestions and records made possible by speech; what has been said about the role of tools is subject to a condition supplied by language, the tool of tools.
Upon the whole, professed transcendentalists have been more aware than have professed empiricists of the fact that language makes the difference between brute and man. The trouble is that they have lacked naturalistic conception of its origin and status. Logos has been cor- 1 The Mind of Primitive Man, p. 98.
rectly identified with mind; but logos and hence mind was conceived supernaturally. Logic was thereby supposed to have its basis in what is beyond human conduct and relationships, and in consequence the separation of the physical and the rational, the actual and the ideal, received its traditional formulation.
In protest against this view empirical thinkers have rarely ventured in discussion of language beyond refer¬ ence to some peculiarity of brain structure, or to some psychic peculiarity, such as tendency to “outer expres¬ sion” of “inner” states. Social interaction and institu¬ tions have been treated as products of a ready-made specific physical or mental endowment of a self-sufficing individual, wherein language acts as a mechanical gobetween to convey observations and ideas that have prior and independent existence. Speech is thus regarded as a practical convenience but not of fundamental intellec¬ tual significance. It consists of “mere words,” sounds, that happen to be associated with perceptions, senti¬ ments and thoughts which are complete prior to language. Language thus, “expresses” thought as a pipe conducts water, and with even less transforming function than is exhibited when a wine-press “expresses” the juice of grapes. The office of signs in creating reflection, fore¬ sight and recollection is passed by. In consequence, the occurrence of ideas becomes a mysterious parallel addi¬ tion to physical occurrences, with no community and no bridge from one to the other.
It is safe to say that psychic events, such as are anything more than reactions of a creature susceptible to pain and diffuse comfort, have language for one of their conditions. It is altogether likely that the “ideas” which Hume found in constant flux whenever he looked within himself were a succession of words silently uttered. Primary to these events there was, of course, a substratum of organic psycho-physical actions. But what made the latter identifiable objects, events with a perceptible character, was their concretion in discourse. When the introspectionist thinks he has withdrawn into a wholly private realm of events disparate in kind from other events, made out of mental stuff, he is only turning his attention to his own soliloquy. And soliloquy is the product and reflex of converse with others; social communication not an effect of soliloquy. If we had not talked with others and they with us, we should never talk to and with ourselves. Because of converse, social give and take, various organic attitudes become an assemblage of persons engaged in con¬ verse, conferring with one another, exchanging distinc¬ tive experiences, listening to one another, over-hearing unwelcome remarks, accusing and excusing. Through speech a person dramatically identifies himself with poten¬ tial acts and deeds; he plays many roles, not in successive stages of life but in a contemporaneously enacted drama. Thus mind emerges.
It is significant of the differences between Greek and modern experience, that when their respective philoso¬ phers discovered discourse, they gave such different ac¬ counts of it. The moderns made of it a world separate from spatial and material existences, a separate and private world made of sensations, images, sentiments. The Greeks were more nearly aware that it was discourse they had discovered. But they took the structure of dis¬ course for the structure of things, instead of for the forms which things assume under the pressure and opportunity of social cooperation and exchange. They overlooked the fact that meanings as objects of thought are entitled to be called complete and ultimate only because they are not original but are a happy outcome of a complex history. They made them primitive and independent forms of things, intrinsically regulative of processes of becoming. They took a work of social art to be nature independent of man. They overlooked the fact that the import of logical and rational essences is the consequence of social interactions, of companionship, mutual assistance, direc¬ tion and concerted action in fighting, festivity, and work. Hence they conceived of ideal meanings as the ultimate framework of events, in which a system of sub¬ stances and properties corresponded to subjects and predicates of the uttered proposition. Things conformed naturally and exactly to parts of speech, some being inherently subject-matter of nouns, proper and common; others of verbs, of which some expressed self-activity, while others designated adjectival and adverbial changes to which things are exposed on account of their own defects; some being external relations in which substances stand to one another, and subject-matter of prepositions.
The resulting theory of substances, essential properties, accidental qualities and relations, and the identification of Being, (by means of the copula “is”) with the tenses of the verb, (so that the highest Being was, is now, and ever shall be, in contrast to existence now and then, occasional, wholly past, merely just now, or possibly at some pas¬ sing time in the future) controlled the whole scheme of physics and metaphysics, which formed the philosophic tradition of Europe. It was a natural consequence of the insight that things, meanings, and words correspond.
The insight was perverted by the notion that the correspondence of things and meanings is prior to discourse and social intercourse. Hence, every true affirmation was an assertion of the fixed belonging to one another of two objects in nature; while every true denial was an assertion of intrinsic exclusion of one object by another. The consequence was belief in ideal essences, individually complete, and yet connected in a system of necessary subordinations and dependencies. Dialectic of their relationships, definition, classification, division in arranging essences, constituted scientific truth about the inmost constituents of nature. Thus a discovery which is the greatest single discovery of man, putting man in potential possession of liberation and of order, became the source of an artificial physics of nature, the basis of a science, philosophy and theology in which the universe was an incarnate grammatical order constructed after the model of discourse.
The modern discovery of inner experience, of a realm of purely personal events that are always at the indivi¬ dual’s command, and that are his exclusively as well as inexpensively for refuge, consolation and thrill is also a great and liberating discovery. It implies a new worth and sense of dignity in human individuality, a sense that an individual is not a mere property of nature, set in place according to a scheme independent of him, as an article is put in its place in a cabinet, but that he adds something, that he marks a contribution. It is the counterpart of what distinguishes modern science, experimental, hypo¬ thetical; a logic of discovery having therefore oppor¬ tunity for individual temperament, ingenuity, invention. It is the counterpart of modern politics, art, religion and industry where individuality is given room and movement, in contrast to the ancient scheme of ex¬ perience, which held individuals tightly within a given order subordinated to its structure and patterns. But here also distortion entered in. Failure to recognize that this world of inner experience is dependent upon an extension of language which is a social product and operation led to the subjectivistic, solipsistic and egotis¬ tic strain in modern thought. If the classic thinkers created a cosmos after the model of dialectic, giving ra¬ tional distinctions power to constitute and regulate, modern thinkers composed nature after the model of personal soliloquizing.
Language considered as an experienced event enables us to interpret what really happened when rational dis¬ course and logic were discovered by the ancients, and when ‘inner’ experience and its interest were discovered by moderns. Language is a natural function of human association; and its consequences react upon other events, physical and human, giving them meaning or significance. Events that are objects or significant exist in a context where they acquire new ways of operation and new prop¬ erties. Words are spoken of as coins and money. Now gold, silver, and instrumentalities of credit are first of all, prior to being money, physical things with their own im¬ mediate and final qualities. But as money they are sub¬ stitutes, representations, and surrogates, which embody relationships. As a substitute, money not merely facili¬ tates exchange of such commodities as existed prior to its use, but it revolutionizes as well production and consump¬ tion of all commodities, because it brings into being new transactions, forming new histories and affairs. Exchange is not an event that can be isolated. It marks the emergence of production and consumption into a new medium and context wherein they acquire new properties.
Language is similarly not a mere agency for economiz¬ ing energy in the interaction of human beings. It is a release and amplification of energies that enter into it, conferring upon them the added quality of meaning. The quality of meaning thus introduced is extended and trans¬ ferred, actually and potentially, from sounds, gestures and marks, to all other things in nature. Natural events become messages to be enjoyed and administered, pre¬ cisely as are song, fiction, oratory, the giving of advice and instruction. Thus events come to possess characters; they are demarcated, and noted. For character is gen¬ eral and distinguished.
When events have communicable meaning, they have marks, notations, and are capable of con-notation and de-notation. They are more than mere occurrences; they have implications. Hence inference and reasoning are possible; these operations are reading the message of things, which things utter because they are involved in human associations. When Aristotle drew a distinction between sensible things that are more noted — known — to us and rational things that are more noted — known — in themselves, he was actually drawing a distinction between things that operate in a local, restricted universe of discourse, and things whose marks are such that they readily enter into indefinitely extensive and varied discourse.
The interaction of human beings, namely, association, is not different in origin from other modes of interaction. There is a peculiar absurdity in the question of how individuals become social, if the question is taken literally. Human beings illustrate the same traits of both immediate uniqueness and connection, relationship, as do other things. No more in their case than in that of atoms and physical masses is immediacy the whole of existence and therefore an obstacle to being acted upon by and effect¬ ing other things. Everything that exists in as far as it is known and knowable is in interaction with other things. It is associated, as well as solitary, single. The catching up of human individuals into association is thus no new and unprecedented fact; it is a manifestation of a com¬ monplace of existence. Significance resides not in the bare fact of association, therefore, but in the consequences that flow from the distinctive patterns of human associa¬ tion. There is, again, nothing new or unprecedented in the fact that assemblage of things confers upon the assembly and its constituents, new properties by means of unlocking energies hitherto pent in. The significant consideration is that assemblage of organic human beings transforms sequence and coexistence into participation.
Gestures and cries are not primarily expressive and communicative. They are modes of organic behavior as much as are locomotion, seizing and crunching. Lan¬ guage, signs and significance, come into existence not by intent and mind but by over-flow, by-products, in ges¬ tures and sound. The story of language is the story of the use made of these occurrences; a use that is eventual, as well as eventful. Those rival accounts of the origin of language that go by the nicknames of bow-wow, poohpooh, and ding-dong theories are not in fact theories of the origin of language. They are accounts, of some plausibility, of how and why certain sounds rather than others were selected to signify objects, acts and situations. If the mere existence of sounds of these kinds constituted language, lower animals might well converse more subtly and fluently than man. But they became language only when used within a context of mutual assistance and direction. The latter are alone of prime importance in considering the transformation of organic gestures and cries into names, things with significance, or the origin of language.
Observable facts of animal experience furnish us with our starting point. “Animals respond to certain stimuli...by the contraction of certain muscles whose functioning is of no direct consequence to the animal itself, but affects other animals by stimulating them to act...Let us call this class the signaling reflexes. A few, but very diversified examples of the signaling reflexes, are the lighting of a fire-fly, the squeezing out of a black liquid from the ink bladder of a cuttle-fish, the crow¬ ing of a rooster...the spreading of its tail by a peacock. These reflex activities affect other animals by stimulating them. If no other animals are present, or these other animals fail to respond by their own reflexes, the former reflex actions are completely wasted.”2 Sub-human animals thus behave in ways which have no direct consequences of utility to the behaving animal, but which call out certain characteristic responses, sexual, protective, food-finding (as with the cluck of a hen to her chicks), in other animals. In some cases, the act evoked 2 Max Meyer, The Psychology Of The Other One, 1922, p. 195; a statement of behavioristic psychology that has hardly received the attention it intrinsically deserves.