depths of the seas, are unowned by either group or per¬ son. The cogent line of defense of the institution of private property is that it promotes prudence, account¬ ability, ingenuity and security, in the production and administration of commodities and resources which exist independently of the relationship of property. In like fashion, not all thoughts and emotions are owned either socially or personally; and either mode of appropriation has to be justified on the basis of distinctive consequences.
Analytic reflection shows that the ordinary conception of causation as a trait belonging to some one thing is the idea of responsibility read backward. The idea that some one thing, or any two or three things, are the cause of an occurrence is in effect an application of the idea of credit or blame — as in the Greek curia. There is nothing in nature that belongs absolutely and exclusively to any¬ thing else; belonging is always a matter of reference and distributive assignment, justified in any particular case as far as it works out well. Greek metaphysics and logic are dominated by the idea of inherent belonging and ex¬ clusion; another instance of naively reading the story of nature in language appropriate to human association.
Modern science has liberated physical events from the domination of the notions of intrinsic belonging and exclu¬ sion, but it has retained the idea with exacerbated vigor in the case of psychological events. The elimination of the category from physics and its retention in psychology has provided a seeming scientific basis for the division between psychology and physics, and thereby for the egotism of modern philosophy. Much subjectivism is only a statement of the logical consequences of the doc¬ trine sponsored by psychological “science” of the monopolistic possession of mental phenomena by a self; or, after the idea of an underlying spiritual substance became shaky, of the doctrine that mental events as such con¬ stitute all there is to selfhood. For the philosophical implications of the latter idea, as far as privacy, monopoly and exclusiveness of causation and belonging are con¬ cerned, are similar to those of the older dogma when it was applied to cosmic nature.
Enough, however, of negation. The positive conse¬ quence is an understanding of the shift of emphasis from the experienced, the objective subject-matter, the what, to the experiencing, the method of its course, the how of its changes. Such a shift occurs whenever the problem of control of production of consequences arises. As long as men are content to enjoy and suffer fire when it happens, fire is just an objective entity which is what it is. That it may be taken as a deity to be adored or propitiated, is evidence that its “whatness” is all there is to it. But when men come to the point of making fire, fire is not an essence, but a mode of natural phenomena, an order in change, a “how” of a historic sequence. The change from immediate use in enjoyment and suffering is equiv¬ alent to recognition of a method of procedure, and of the alliance of insight into method with possibility of control.
The development of the conception of experiencing as a distinctive operation is akin to the growth of the idea of fire-making out of direct experiences with fire. Fire is fire, inherently just what it is; but making fire is rela¬ tional. It takes thought away from fire to the other things that help and prevent its occurrence. So with experience in the sense of things that are experienced; they are what they are. But-their-oocurrence as experienced things is ascertained to be dependent upon atti-7 tudes and dispositions; the manner of their happening is found to be affected by the habits of an organic individual. Since myth and science concern the same objects in the same natural world, sun, moon, and stars, the difference between them cannot be determined exclusively on the basis of these natural objects. A differential has to found in distinctive ways of experiencing natural objects; it is perceived that man is an emotional and imaginative as well as an observing and reasoning creature, and that different manners of experiencing affect the status of subject-matter experienced. Capacity to distinguish be¬ tween the sun and moon of science and these same things as they figure in myth and cult depends upon capacity to distinguish different attitudes and dispositions of the subject; the heroes of legend and poetry are discrimi¬ nated from historic characters when memory, imagina¬ tion and idealizing emotion are taken into the reckoning.
Again, it is discovered that the good of some objects is connected with one way of experiencing, namely appetite, while the acquisition of goodness by other objects is dependent upon the operation of reflection. In conse¬ quence, the experienced objects are differentiated as to their goodness, although good as an essence is unchanged. The importam^_olmo4es--o£_exDeriencin p- for control experienced objects may be illustrated from ernnnmir ihficry. A study of various economic essences or con¬ cepts is possible: definition, classification and dialectical reference to one another of such meanings as value, utility, rent, exchange, profit, wages, etc. There is also possible a positivistic study of existential economic regimes, resulting in description of their structures and operations. If the presence and operation of disposi¬ tions and attitudes be neglected, these alternatives exhaust the field of inquiry. Neither the study of objective essences nor of objective existences is avail¬ able, however, in problems of polity, in management of economic events. When the “psychological” factor is introduced, say, a study of the effects of certain ways of experiencing, such as incentives, desires, fatigue, monotony, habit, waste-motions, insecurity, prestige, team work, fashion, esprit de corps, and a multitude of like factors, the situation changes. Factors that are within control are specified, and a fuller degree of deliberate administration of events is made possible. The objectiv¬ ity of events remains what it was, but the discovery of the r61e of personal dispositions in conditioning their occur¬ rence, enables us to interpret and connect them in new ways, ways, which are susceptible of greater regulation than were the other ways. Banks, stores, factories do not become psychical when we ascertain the part played in their genesis and operation by psychological factors; they remain as external to the organism and to a particular mind as ever they were, things experienced as are winds and stars. But we get a new leverage, intel¬ lectual and practical, upon them when we can convert description of ready-made events and dialectical relation of ready-made notions into an account of a way of occurrence. For a perceived mode of becoming is always ready to be translated into a method of production and direction.
Since modern natural science has been concerned with discovery of conditions of production, to be employed as means for consequences, the development of interest in attitudes of individual subjects — the psychological inter¬ est — is but an extension of its regular business. Knowl¬ edge of conditions of the occurrence of experienced objects is not complete until we have included organic conditions as well as extra-organic conditions. Knowledge of the latter may account for a happening in the abstract but not for the concrete or experienced happening. A general knowledge of dispositions and attitudes renders us exactly the same sort of intellectual and practical service as pos¬ session of physical constants. The trouble lies in the inadequacy of our present psychological knowledge. And it is probably this deficiency, which renders such psycho¬ logical knowledge as we possess unavailable for technologi¬ cal control, which, joined to spontaneous interest in “inner” life, has set off psychological subject-matter as a separate world of existence, instead of a discovery of attitudes and dispositions involved in the world of com¬ mon experience. In truth, attitudes, dispositions and their kin, while capable of being distinguished and made concrete intellectual objects, are never separate existences. They are always of, from, toward, situations and things.
They may be studied with a minimum of attention to the things at and away from which they are directed. The things with which they are concerned may for purposes of inquiry be represented by a blank, a symbol to be specifi¬ cally filled in as occasion demands. But except as ways of seeking, turning from, appropriating, treating things, they have no existence nor significance.
Every type of culture has experienced resistance and frustration. These events are interpreted according to the bias dominating a particular type of culture. To the modern European mind they have been interpreted as results of the opposed existence of subject and object as independent forms of Being. The notion is now so established in tradition that to many thinkers it appears to be a datum, not an interpretative classification. But the East Indian has envisaged the same phenomena as evidence of the contrast of an illusory world to which corresponds domination by desires and a real world due to emancipation from desires, attained through ascetic dis¬ cipline and meditation. The Greeks interpreted the same experience on the basis of the cosmic discrepancy of being and becoming, form and matter, as the reluctance of existence to become a complete and transparent medium of meaning. Taken absolutely, the interpretation on the basis of opposition of subject and object has no advan¬ tage over the other doctrines; it is a local and provincial interpretation. Taken inherently or absolutely, it has an absurdity from which they are free; for subject and object antithetically defined can have logically no transactions with each other. Taken as a factor in the enterprise of overcoming resistance and reducing the prospects of frustration, statement in terms of distinction of subject and object is intelligible, and is more valuable than the other modes of statement. Objectis, as Basil Gildersleeve said, that which objects, that to which frustration is due.
But it is also the object ive; the final and eventual con¬ summation, an integrated secure independent state of affairs. The subject is that which suffers, is subjected and which endures resistance and frustration; it is also that which attempts subjection of hostile conditions; that which takes the immediate initiative in remaking the situation as it stands. Subjective and objective dis¬ tinguished as factors in a regulated effort at modification of the environing world have an intelligible meaning. Subjectivism as an “ism” converts this historic, relative and instrumental status and function into something absolute and fixed; while pure “objectivism” is a doctrine of fatalism.
To-day there is marked revival of objectivism, even of externalism. The world of physical science is no longer new and strange; to many it is now familiar; while many of those to whom it is personally unfamiliar take it for granted on authority. To a considerable extent its sub¬ ject-matter is taking the place of the subject-matter of older creeds as something given ready-made, demanding unhesitating credence and passive acceptance. The doc¬ trine of the opposition of subject and object in knowledge is fading, becoming reminiscent; that sense of strain which is lacking accompanied transition from one set of beliefs to another very different set. Only in politics and eco¬ nomics is the opposition of subject and institutional object poignant. And even in these fields radical and conservative increasingly appeal to objects which are collective, non¬ individual. The conservative recurs to the objectivism of established institutions, idealized into intrinsic stabil¬ ity; the radical looks forward to the completed outcome of an objective and necessary economic evolution. In spite of the appeal to the catchwords of individualism, pri¬ vate initiative, voluntary abstinence, personal industry and effort, there ismore danger at present that the genuinely creative effort of (the individual will be lost than there is of any return to earlier individualism. Everything makes for the mass. When private property is talked about, the product of individual labor is no longer meant; but a legally buttressed institution. Capital is no longer the outcome of deliberate personal sacrifice, but is an insti¬ tution of corporations and finance with massive political and social ramifications. Appeals to secure action of a certain sort may use the old words; but the fears and hopes which are now aroused are not really connected with freedom of individual thought and effort, but with the objective foundations of society, established “law and order.”
This resort to an objectivism which ignores initiating and re-organizing desire and imagination will in the end only strengthen that other phase of subjectivism which consists in escape to the enjoyment of inward landscape. Men who are balked of a legitimate realization of their subjectivity, men who are forced to confine innovating need and projection of ideas to technical modes of indus¬ trial and political life, and to specialized or “scientific” fields of intellectual activity, will compensate by finding release within their inner consciousness. There will be one philosophy, a realistic one, for mathematics, physical science and the established social order; another, and opposed, philosophy for the affairs of personal life. The objection to dualism is not just that it is a dualism, but that it forces upon us antithetical, non-convertible princi¬ ples of formulation and interpretation. If there is com¬ plete split in nature and experience then of course no ingenuity can explain it away; it must be accepted. But in case no such sharp division actually exists, the evils of supposing there is one are not confined to philosophical theory. Consequences within philosophy as such are of no great import. But philosophical dualism is but a formulated recognition of an impasse in life; an impotence in interaction, inability to make effective transition, limitation of power to regulate and thereby to understand.
Capricious pragmatism based on exaltation of personal desire; consolatory estheticism based on capacity for wringing contemplative enjoyment from even the trage¬ dies of the outward spectacle; refugee idealism based on rendering thought omnipotent in the degree in which it is ineffective in concrete affairs; — these forms of subjectiv¬ ism register an acceptance of whatever obstacles at the time prevent the active participation of the self in the ongoing course of events. Only when obstacles are treated as challenges to remaking of personal desire and thought, so that the latter integrate with the movement of nature and by participation direct its consequences, are opposition and duality rightly understood.
Existentially speaking, a human individual is distinc¬ tive opacity of bias and preference conjoined with plastic¬ ity and permeability of needs and likings. One trait tends to isolation, discreteness; the other trait to connection, continuity. This ambivalent character is rooted in nature, whose events have their own distinctive indifferencies, resistances, arbitrary closures and intolerances, and also their peculiar openness, warm responsiveness, greedy seekings and transforming unions. The conjunction in nature of whimsical contingency and lawful uniformity is the result of these two characters of events. They persist upon the human plane, and as ultimate characters are ineradicable. Boundaries, demarcations, abrupt, and expansive over-reachings of boundaries impartially and conjunctively mark every phase of human life.
The human individual in his opacity of bias is in so far doomed to a blind solitariness. He hugs himself in his isolation and fights against disclosure, the give and take of communication, as for the very integrity of existence. Even communicable meanings are tinged with color of the uncommunicated; there is a quality of reserve in every publicity. Everything may be done with this irreducible uniqueness except to get rid of it. The sense of it may add a bitter loneliness to experience. It may lead to restless insatiable throwing of the self into every opportunity of external business and dissipation in order to escape from it. It may be cherished, nurtured, devel¬ oped into a cultivated consolatory detachment from the affairs of life, ending in the delusion of the superiority of the private inner life to all else, or in the illusion that one can really succeed in emancipating himself in his pure inwardness from connection with the world and society. It may express itself in elaborated schemes of self-pity and in bursts of defiant exclamation: Here I stand and cannot otherwise. It may lead to unreasoned loyalty to seemingly lost causes and forlorn hopes — and events may sometimes justify the faith.
Romanticism has made the best and the worst of the discovery of the private and incommunicable. It has converted a pervasive and inevitable color and temper of experience into its substance. In conceiving that this inexpugnable uniqueness, this ultimate singularity, ex¬ hausts the self, it has created a vast and somnambulic ego¬ tism out of the fact of subjectivity. For every existence in addition to its qualitative and intrinsic boundaries has affinities and active outreachings for connection and intimate union. It is an energy of attraction, expansion and supplementation. The ties and bonds of associated life are spontaneous uncalculated manifestations of this phase of human selfhood, as the union of hydrogen and oxygen is natural and unpremeditated. Sociability, com¬ munication are just as immediate traits of the concrete individual as is the privacy of the closet of consciousness. To define one’s self within closed limits, and then to try out the self in expansive acts that inevitably result in an eventual breaking down of the walled-in self, are equally natural and inevitable acts. Here is the ultimate “dialectic” of the universal and individual. One no sooner establishes his private and subjective self than he demands it be recognized and acknowledged by others, even if he has to invent an imaginary audience or an Absolute Self to satisfy the demand. And no person taught by experience ever escapes the reflection that no matter how much he does for himself, what endures is only what is done for others: an observation however which is most comforting when it takes the form of attributing desire to serve others to acts which indulge the exclusive self.
In some form or other, the dualism erected between the ego and the world of things and persons represents failure to attain solution of the problem set by this ambiguous nature of the self. It is a formulated accept¬ ance of oscillation between surrender to the external and assertion of the inner. In science and in art, especially in the art of intercourse, real solutions occur. Private bias manages in them to manifest itself in innovations and deviations, which reshape the world of objects and insti¬ tutions, and which eventually facilitate communication and understanding. Thereby the final and efficient, the limiting and the expansive, attain a harmony which they do not possess in other natural events.
Thus an individual existence has a double status and import. There is the individual that belongs in a contin¬ uous system of connected events which reinforce its activities and which form a world in which it is at home, consistently at one with its own preferences, satisfying its requirements. Such an individual is in its world as a member, extending as far as the moving equilibrium of which it is a part lends support. It is a natural end, not as an abrupt and immediate termination but as a fulfill¬ ment. Then there is the individual that finds a gap between its distinctive bias and the operations of the things through which alone its need can be satisfied; it is broken off, discrete, because it is at odds with its surround¬ ings. It either surrenders, conforms, and for the sake of peace becomes a parasitical subordinate, indulges in egotistical solitude; or its activities set out to remake con¬ ditions in accord with desire. In the latter process, intel¬ ligence is born — not mind which appropriates and enjoys the whole of which it is a part, but mind as individualized, initiating, adventuring, experimenting, dissolving. Its possessed powers, its accomplished unions with the world, are now reduced to uncertain agencies to be forged into efficient instrumentalities in the stress and strain of trial.
The individual, the self, centred in a settled world which owns and sponsors it, and which in turn it owns and enjoys, is finished, closed. Surrender of what is possessed, disowning of what supports one in secure ease, is involved in all inquiry and discovery; the latter implicate an individual still to make, with all the risks implied therein. For to arrive at new truth and vision is to alter. The old self is put off and the new self is only forming, and the form it finally takes will depend upon the unforeseeable result of an adventure. No one discovers a new world without for¬ saking an old one; and no one discovers a new world who exacts guarantee in advance for what it shall be, or who puts the act of discovery under bonds with respect to what the new world shall do to him when it comes into vision. This is the truth in the exaggeration of subjectivism. Only by identification with remaking the objects that now obtain are we saved from complacent objectivism. Those who do not fare forth and take the risks attendant upon the formation of new objects and the growth of a new self, are subjected perforce to inevitable change of the settled and close world they have made their own. Identification of the bias and preference of selfhood with the process of intelligent remaking achieves an indestructible union of the instrumental and the final. For this bias can be satisfied no matter what the frustration of other desires and endeavors.
That an individual, possessed of some mode and degree of organized unity, participates in the genesis of every experienced situation, whether it be an object or an activity, is evident. That the way in which it is engaged affects the quality of the situation experienced is evident. That the way in which it is engaged has consequences that modify not merely the environment but which react to modify the active agent; that every form of life in the higher organisms constantly conserves some consequences of its prior experiences, is also evident. The constancy and pervasiveness of the operative presence of the self as a determining factor in all situations is the chief reason why we give so little heed to it; it is more intimate and omnipresent in experience than the air we breathe. Only feels unfriendliness among the eternities of sevententhcentury thought. The spirit wants to be at home with itself, well-friended in the comprehension of its inner processes. It loves to be confidential in its heart out¬ pourings, keen in its analysis, humane in its attitude toward life.”
We are given to referring the beginnings of subjectiv¬ ism to Descartes, with his pensee as the indubitable certainty, or to Locke with his simple idea as immediate object. Technically or with respect to later dialectical developments, this reference is correct enough. But historically it is wrong. Descartes’ thought is the nous of classic tradition forced inwards because physical science had extruded it from its object. Its internality is a logical necessity of the attempt to reconcile the new science with the old tradition, not a thing intrinsically important. Similarly Locke’s simple idea is the classic Idea, Form or Species dislodged from nature and com¬ pelled to take refuge in mind. For Locke, it is coerced by external existence and remains coercive for all subsequent intellectual operations. The subjective as such is alien to Locke’s way of thinking; his whole bias is against it, and in favor of what is grounded in nature being a matter of relations already established. The “simple idea” is merely man’s available point of contact with the objec¬ tive order; and in this contact resides its whole import.
From the standpoint of “inner life” the simple idea became however, a sensation, that is, a feeling, a state of mind, an intrinsically interesting event having its own significant career. If this were true of such a rudimen¬ tary thing as blue or soft, how much more significantly it holds of imagination and emotion. Inner reveries and enjoyments constitute freedom to the natural man. Everywhere else is constraint, whether it be of study, of science, family life, industry, or government. The road to freedom by escape into the inner life is no modern dis¬ covery; it was taken by savages, by the oppressed, by children, long before it was formulated in philosophical romanticism. The generalized awareness of the fact is new however, and it added a new dimension to charac¬ teristically modern experience. It created new forms of art and new theories of esthetics, often promulgated by literary artists who have nothing but contempt for philo¬ sophical theories as such. Mr. Santayana is a thinker whose intent and basis are at one with classic thought. But if we note the importance assumed in his thinking by the “inward landscape,” there is before us a measure of the pervasive influence of the kind of experience that was seized upon by Romanticism as the exclusive truth of experience.