On the other hand, a consummation or satisfaction carries with it the continuation, in allied and reinforcing form, of preparatory or anticipatory activities. It is not only a culmination out of them, but is an integrated cumu¬ lation, a funded conservation of them. Comfort or dis¬ comfort, fatigue or exhilaration, implicity sum up a his¬ tory, and thereby unwittingly provide a means whereby, (when other conditions become present) the past can be unravelled and made explicit. For it is characteristic of feeling that while it may exist in a formless condition, or without configured distinctions, it is capable of receiving and bearing distinctions without end. With the multi¬ plication of sensitive discriminatory reactions to different energies of the environment (the differentiation of senseorgans, extero-ceptors and proprio-ceptors) and with the increase in scope and delicacy of movements (the develop¬ ment of motor-organs, to which internal glandular organs for effecting a requisite redistributuion of energy correspond), feelings vary more and more in quality and intensity.
Complex and active animals have, therefore, feelings which vary abundantly in quality, corresponding to dis¬ tinctive directions and phases — initiating, mediating, ful¬ filling or frustrating — of activities, bound up in distinc¬ tive connections with environmental affairs. They have them, but they do not know they have them. Activity is psycho-physical, but not “mental,” that is, not aware of meanings. As life is a character of events in a peculiar condition of organization, and “feeling” is a quality of life-forms marked by complexly mobile and discriminat¬ ing responses, so “mind” is an added property assumed by a feeling creature, when it reaches that organized inter¬ action with other living creatures which is language, communication. Then the qualities of feeling become significant of objective differences in external things and of episodes past and to come. This state of things in which qualitatively different feelings are not just had but are significant of objective differences, is mind. Feel¬ ings are no longer just felt. They have and they make sense; record and prophesy.
That is to say, differences in qualities (feelings) of acts when employed as indications of acts performed and to be performed and as signs of their consequences, mean some¬ thing. And they mean it directly; the meaning is had as their own character. Feelings make sense; as immediate meanings of events and objects, they are sensations, or, more properly, sensa. Without language, the qualities of organic action that are feelings are pains, pleasures, odors, colors, noises, tones, only potentially and proleptically. With language they are discriminated and identified. They are then “objectified;” they are immediate traits of things. This “objectification” is not a miracu¬ lous ejection from the organism or soul into external things, nor an illusory attribution of psychical entities to physical things. The qualities never were ‘ ‘in’ ’ the organ¬ ism; they always were qualities of interactions in which both extra-organic things and organisms partake. When named, they enable identification and discrimination of things to take place as means in a further course of inclu¬ sive interaction. Hence they are as much qualities of the things engaged as of the organism. For purposes of control they may be referred specifically to either the thing or to the organism or to a specified structure of the organism. Thus color which turns out not to be a rehaable sign of external events becomes a sign of, say, a defect in visual apparatus. The notion that sensory affections discriminate and identify themselves, apart from discourse, as being colors and sounds, etc., and thus ipso facto constitute certain elementary modes of knowl¬ edge, even though it be only knowledge of their own existence, is inherently so absurd that it would never have occurred to any one to entertain it, were it not for certain preconceptions about mind and knowledge. Sentiency in itself is anoetic; it exists as any immediate qual¬ ity exists, but nevertheless it is an indispensable means of any noetic function.
For when, through language, sentience is taken up into a system of signs, when for example a certain quality of the active relationship of organism and environment is named hunger, it is seen as an organic demand for an extra-organic object. To term a quality “hunger,” to name it, is to refer to an object, to food, to that which will satisfy it, towards which the active situation moves. Similarly, to name another quality “red,” is to direct an interaction between an organism and a thing to some object which fulfills the demand or need of the situation. It requires but slight observation of mental growth of a child to note that organically conditioned qualities, includ¬ ing those special sense-organs, are discriminated only as they are employed to designate objects; red, for instance, as the property of a dress or toy. The difficulty in the way of identifying the qualities of acts conditioned by proprio-ceptor organs is notoriously enormous. They just merge in the general situation. If they entered into communication as shared means to social consequences they would acquire the same objective distinctiveness as do qualities conditioned by the extero-ceptor organs. On the other hand, the qualities of the latter are just shades of the general tone of situations until they are used, in language, as common or shared means to common ends. Then they are identified as traits of objects. The child has to learn through social intercourse that certain quali¬ ties of action mean greediness or anger or fear or rude¬ ness; the case is not otherwise with those qualities which are identified as red, musical tone, a foul odor. The latter may have instigated nausea, and “red” may have excited uneasiness (as blood makes some persons faint); but discrimination of the nauseating object as foul odor, and of the excitation as red occurs only when they are designated as signs.
The qualities of situations in which organisms and surrounding conditions interact, when discriminated, make sense. Sense is distinct from feeling, for it has a recog¬ nized reference; it is the qualitative characteristic of something, not just a submerged unidentified quality or tone. Sense is also different from signification. The latter involves use of a quality as a sign or index of some¬ thing else, as when the red of a light signifies danger, and the need of bringing a moving locomotive to a stop. The sense of a thing, on the other hand, is an immediate and immanent meaning; it is meaning which is itself felt or directly had. When we are baffled by perplexing conditions, and finally hit upon a clew, and everything falls into place, the whole thing suddenly, as we say, “makes sense.” In such a situation, the clew has signifi¬ cation in virtue of being an indication, a guide to inter¬ pretation. But the meaning of the whole situation as apprehended is sense. This idiomatic usage of the word sense is much nearer the empirical facts than is the ordin¬ ary restriction of the word in psychological literature to a single simple recognized quality, like sweet or red: the latter simply designates a case of minimum sense, delib¬ erately limited for purposes of intellectual safety-first. Whenever a situation has this double function of meaning, namely signification and sense, mind, intellect is definitely present.
The distinction between physical, psycho-physical, and mental is thus one of levels of increasing complexity and intimacy of interaction among natural events. The idea that matter, life and mind represent separate kinds of Being is a doctrine that springs, as so many philosophic errors have sprung, from a substantiation of eventual functions. The fallacy converts consequences of inter¬ action of events into causes of the occurrence of these consequences — a reduplication which is significant as to the importance of the functions, but which hopelessly confuses understanding of them. “Matter,” or the physical, is a character of events when they occur at a certain level of interaction. It is not itself an event or existence; the notion that while “mind” denotes essence, “matter” denotes existence is superstition. It is more than a bare essence; for it is a property of a particular field of interacting events. But as it figures in science it is as much an essence, as is acceleration, or the square root of minus one; which meanings also express derivative characters of events in interaction. Consequently, while the theory that life, feeling and thought are never inde¬ pendent of physical events may be deemed materialism, it may also be considered just the opposite. For it is rea¬ sonable to believe that the most adequate definition of the basic traits of natural existence can be had only when its properties are most fully displayed — a condition which is met in the degree of the scope and intimacy of inter¬ actions realized.
In any case, genuine objection to metaphysical material¬ ism is neither moral nor esthetic. Historically speaking, materialism and mechanistic metaphysics — as distinct from mechanistic science — designate the doctrine that mat¬ ter is the efficient cause of life and mind, and that “cause” occupies a position superior in reality to that of “effect.” Both parts of this statement are contrary to fact. As far as the conception of causation is to be introduced at all, not matter but the natural events having matter as a character, “cause” life and mind. “Effects,” since they mark the release of potentialities, are more adequate indications of the nature of nature than are just “causes.” Control of the occurrence of the complex depends upon its analysis into the more elementary; the dependence of life, sentiency and mind upon “matter” is thus practical or instrumental. Lesser, more external fields of interac¬ tion are more manageable than are wider and more intimate ones, and only through managing the former can we direct the occurrence of the latter. Thus it is in virtue of the character of events which is termed matter that psycho-physical and intellectual affairs can be dif¬ ferentially determined. Every discovery of concrete dependence of life and mind upon physical events is there¬ fore an addition to our resources. If life and mind had no mechanism, education, deliberate modification, recti¬ fication, prevention and constructive control would be impossible. To damn “matter” because of honorific interest in spirit is but another edition of the old habit of eulogizing ends and disparaging the means on which they depend.
This, then, is the significance of our introductory state¬ ment that the “solution” of the problem of mind-body is to be found in a revision of the preliminary assumptions about existence which generate the problem. As we have already noted, fruitful science of nature began when inquirers neglected immediate qualities, the “sense” of events, wet and dry, hot and cold, light and heavy, up and down, in behalf of “primary,” namely, signifying, quali¬ ties, and when they treated the latter, although called qualities, not as such but as relations. This device made possible a totally different dialectical treatment. Classic science operated in terms of properties already attached to qualitative phenomena of sense and custom. Hence it could only repeat these phenomena in a changed vocabu¬ lary; — the vocabulary of sensory forms and forces which were, after all nothing but the already given meanings of things reduplicated. But the new dialectic was that of mathematical equations and functions. It started from meanings which ignored obvious characters or meanings of phenomena; hence it could lead to radically new relation¬ ships and generalizations — new in kind, and not merely in detail. No longer was the connection or classifica¬ tion of one color simply with other colors, but with all events involving rhythmic rates of change. Thus events hitherto disjoined were brought together under princi¬ ples of inclusive formulation and prediction. Temporal qualities were stated as spatial velocities; thereby mathe¬ matical functions directly applicable to spatial positions, directions and distances, made it possible to reduce sequence of events into calculable terms. Neglect of temporal qualities as such centered thought upon order of succession, an order convertible into one of coexistence.
All this in effect is equivalent to seizing upon relations of events as the proper objects of knowledge. The sur¬ render of immediate qualities, sensory and significant, as objects of science, and as proper forms of classification and understanding, left in reality these immediate quali¬ ties just as they were; since they are had there is no need to know them. But, as we have had frequent occa¬ sion to notice, the traditional view that the object of knowledge is reality par excellence led to the conclusion that the proper object of science was pre-eminently meta¬ physically real. Hence immediate qualities, being ex¬ truded from the object of science, were left thereby hang¬ ing loose from the “real” object. Since their existence could not be denied, they were gathered together into a psychic realm of being, set over against the object of physics. Given this premise, all the problems regarding the relation of mind and matter, the psychic and the bodily, necessarily follow. Change the metaphysical pre¬ mise; restore, that is to say, immediate qualities to their rightful position as qualities of inclusive situations, and the problems in question cease to be epistemological prob¬ lems. They become specifiable scientific problems: ques¬ tions, that is to say, of how such and such an event hav¬ ing such and such qualities actually occurs.
Greek science imputed efficacy to qualities like wet and dry, hot and cold, heavy and light and to such qualita¬ tive differences in movement as up and down, to and fro, around and around. The world was formulated and explained on the basis of the causal efficacy of these qualities. The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century took its departure from a denial of causal status (and hence of significance for science) of these and all other direct qualities. On account, however, of the con¬ version of this fact about scientific procedure into a denial of the existence of qualities outside of mind and consciousness, psycho-physical and mental functions became inexplicable anomalies, supernatural in the literal sense of the word. The error of Greek science lay not in assigning qualities to natural existence, but in miscon¬ ceiving the locus of their efficacy. It attributed to qualities apart from organic action efficiencies which qualities possess only through the medium of an organized activity of life and mind. When life and mind are recog¬ nized to be characters of the highly complex and extensive interaction of events, it is possible to give natural existen¬ tial status to qualities, without falling into the mistake of Greek science. Psycho-physical phenomena and higher mental phenomena may be admitted in their full empirical reality, without recourse to dualistic breach in historic, existential continuity.
When knowing inanimate things, qualities as such may be safely disregarded. They present themselves as inten¬ sities and vector directions of movement capable of state¬ ment in mathematical terms. Thus their immediate individuality is got around; it is impertinent for science, concerned as the latter is with relationships. The most that can be said about qualities in the inanimate field is that they mark the limit of the contact of historical affairs, being abrupt ends or termini, boundaries of beginning and closing where a particular interaction ceases. They are like a line of foam marking the impact of waves of different directions of movement. They have to be noted and accepted in order to delimit a field of inquiry, but they do not enter into the inquiry as factors or terms.
In life and mind they play an active role. The delimi¬ tation or individualization they constitute on this level is not external to events. It is all one with the organiza¬ tion which permeates them, and which in permeating them, converts prior limitations of intensity and direc¬ tion of energy into actual and intrinsic qualities, or sen¬ tient differences. F or in feeling a quality exists as quality, and not merely as an abrupt, discrete, unique delimitation of interaction. Red differs from green for purposes of physical science as that which gives specific meaning to two sets of numbers applied to vibrations, or to two differ¬ ent placements of lines in a spectrum. The difference is proleptically qualitative; it refers to a unique difference of potentiality in the affairs under consideration. But as far as calculation and prediction are concerned these dif¬ ferences remain designable by non-qualitative indices of number and form. But in an organic creature sensitive to light, these differences of potentiality may be realized as differences in immediate sentiency. To say that they are felt, is to say that they come to independent and intrin¬ sic existence on their own account. The proposition does not mean that feeling has been extraneously superadded to something else, or that a mode of extrinsic cognitive access to a purely physical thing has entered intrusively into a world of physical things. “Feeling” is in general a name for the newly actualized quality acquired by events previously occurring upon a physical level, when these events come into more extensive and delicate relationships of interaction. More specifically, it is a name for the coming to existence of those ultimate differences in affairs which mark them off from one another and give them discreteness; differences which upon the physical plane can be spoken of only in antici¬ pation of subsequent realization, or in terms of different numerical formulae, and different space-time positions and contiguities.
Thus qualities characteristic of sentiency are qualities of cosmic events. Only because they are such, is it pos¬ sible to establish the one to one correspondence which natural science does establish between series of numbers and spatial positions on one hand and the series and spectra of sensory qualities on the other. The notion that the universe is split into two separate and disconnected realms of existence, one psychical and the other physical, and then that these two realms of being, in spite of their total disjunction, specifically and minutely correspond to each other — as a serial order of numbered vibrations corre¬ sponds to the immediately felt qualities of vision of the prismatic spectrum — presents the acme of incredibility. The one-to-one agreement is intelligible only as a cor¬ respondence of properties and relations in one and the same world which is first taken upon a narrower and more external level of interaction, and then upon a more inclu¬ sive and intimate level. When we recall that by taking natural events on these two levels and instituting point to point correspondence (or “parallelism”) between them, the richer and more complex display of characters is rendered amenable to prediction and deliberate guidance, the intelligibility of the procedure becomes concretely sensible.
Thus while modern science is correct in denying direct efficacy and position in the described sequence of events to say, red, or dry; yet Greek science was correct in its underlying naive assumption that qualities count for something highly important. Apart from sentiency and life, the career of an event can indeed be fully described without any reference to its having red as a quality, — though even in this case, since description is an event which happens only through mental events, dependence upon an overt or actualized quality of red is required in order to delimit the phenomenon of which a mathematicalmechanical statement is made. Qualities actually become specifically effective however, in psycho-physical situa¬ tions. Where animal susceptibility exists, a red or an odor or sound may instigate a determinate mode of action; it has selective power in maintenance of a certain pat¬ tern of energy-organization. So striking is this fact that we might even define the difference between an inanimate body and a vital and psycho-physical one, by saying that the latter responds to qualities while the former does not.
In this response, qualities become productive of results, and hence potentially significant. That is, in achieving effects, they become connected with consequences, and hence capable of meaning, knowable if not known. This explains the fact that while we are forced to ascribe qualities to events on the physical level, we cannot know them on this level; they have when assigned strictly to that level no consequences. But through the medium of living things, they generate effects, which, when qualities are used as means to produce them, are consequences. Thus qualities become intelligible, knowable.
In the higher organisms, those with distance-receptors of ear and eye and, in lesser degree, of smelling, qualities further achieve a difference which is the material basis or substratum of a distinction into activities having pre¬ paratory and having consummatory status. “Ends” are not necessarily fulfillments or consummations. They may be mere closures, abrupt cessations, as a railway line may by force of external conditions come to an end, although the end does not fulfill antecedent activities. So there are starts, beginnings which are in no sense pre¬ paratory, being rather disturbances and interferences. Events of the physical type have such ends and begin¬ nings which mark them off qualitatively and individually. But as such they are not in any true sense possessed of instrumental nor fulfilling character. They neither initiate nor complete. But when these qualities are realized through organic action, giving rise to acts of utili¬ zation, of adaptation (response to quality), they are con¬ verted into a series, in which some acts are preparatory and others consummatory. An original contact-activity (including intra-organic disturbances or needs) renders distance receptors open to stimulation; the responses which take place in consequence tend to occur in such a way as to terminate in a further contact-activity in which original need is satisfied.
This series forms the immediate material of thought when social communication and discourse supervene. The beginning not only is the initial term in a series (as distinct from a succession), but it gains the meaning of subsequent activity moving toward a consequence of which it is the first member. The concluding term con¬ serves within itself the meaning of the entire preparatory process. Thereby the original status of contact and dis¬ tance activities is reversed. When activity is directed by distant things, contact activities must be inhibited or held in. They become instrumental; they function only as far as is needed to direct the distance-conditioned activities. The result is nothing less than revolutionary.
Organic activity is liberated from subjection to what is closest at hand in space and time. Man is led or drawn rather than pushed. The immediate is significant in respect to what has occurred and will occur; the organic basis of memory and expectation is supplied. The sub¬ ordination of contact-activity to distance-activity is equivalent to possibility of release from submergence in the merely given, namely, to abstraction, generalization, in¬ ference. It institutes both a difference and a connection between matters that prepare the way for other events and the affairsfinally appropriated; it furnishes the material for the relation of thing signifying and thing signified — a relation that is actualized when discourse occurs. When this juncture of events is reached, there comes about the distinction mentioned between sense and signification.
The latter denotes the possibility of a later fulfilling sense of things in immediate appropriations and enjoyments. But meanwhile there is a sentience that has to be trans¬ formed by subordination to the distance-conditioned activity; which till it is thus transformed is vacant, con¬ fused, demanding but lacking meaning. Meanwhile also the distance-conditioned activities acquire as an integral part of their own quality the consequences of their prior fulfilments. They have significance with respect to their consequences; but they have perspicuous and coherent sense of their own. Thus they become final, and the qualities of contact-activity instrumental. In short, hear¬ ing and vision are notoriously the intellectual and esthetic senses — an undeniable fact which throws much light on the doctrine of those theorists about value who attempt to divide thought and enjoyable liking from each other in their definitions of value, and who also — quite logi¬ cally on this premise — sharply separate values into con¬ tributory and intrinsic.
The foregoing discussion is both too technical and not elaborately technical enough for adequate comprehension. It may be conceived as an attempt to contribute to what has come to be called an “emergent” theory of mind. But every word that we can use, organism, feeling, psycho¬ physical, sensation and sense, “emergence” itself, is infected by the associations of old theories, whose import is opposite to that here stated. We may, however attempt a recapitulation by premising that while there is no isolated occurrence in nature, yet interaction and con¬ nection are not wholesale and homogenous. Interactingevents have tighter and looser ties, which qualify them with certain beginnings and endings, and which mark them off from other fields of interaction. Such relatively closed fields come into conjunction at times so as to inter¬ act with each other, and a critical alteration is effected. A new larger field is formed, in which new energies are released, and to which new qualities appertain. Regula¬ tion, conscious direction and science imply ability to smooth over the rough junctures, and to form by trans¬ lation and substitution a homogenous medium. Yet these functions do not abrogate or deny qualitative differences and unlike fields or ranges of operation, from atoms to solar systems. They do just what they are meant to do: give facility and security in utilizing the simpler manageable field to predict and modify the course of the more complete and highly organized.
In general, three plateaus of such fields may be dis¬ criminated. The first, the scene of narrower and more external interactions, while qualitatively diversified in itself, is physical; its distinctive properties are those of the mathematical-mechanical system discovered by physics and which define matter as a general character. The second level is that of life. Qualitative differences, like those of plant and animal, lower and higher animal forms, are here even more conspicuous; but in spite of their variety they have qualities in common which define the psycho-physical. The third plateau is that of association, communication, participation. This is still further inter¬ nally diversified, consisting of individualities. It is marked throughout its diversities, however, by common properties, which define mind as intellect; possession of and response to meanings.
Each of one of these levels having its own characteris¬ tic empirical traits has its own categories. They are however categories of description, conceptions required to state the fact in question. They are not “explanatory” categories, as explanation is sometimes understood; they do not designate, that is, the operation of forces as “causes.” They stick to empirical facts noting and denoting charac¬ teristic qualities and consequences peculiar to various levels of interaction. Viewed from this standpoint, the traditional “mechanical” and “teleological” theories both suffer from a common fallacy, which may be suggested by saying that they both purport to be explanatory in the old, non-historical sense of causality. One theory makes matter account for the existence of mind; the other regards happenings that precede the appearance of mind as prep¬ arations made for the sake of mind in a sense of preparation that is alleged to explain the occurrence of these ante¬ cedents.
Mechanistic metaphysics calls attention to the fact that the latter occurrence could not have taken place without the earlier; that given the earlier, the latter was bound to follow. Spiritualistic metaphysics calls attention to the fact that the earlier, material affairs, prepare the way for vital and ideal affairs, lead up to them; promote them. Both statements are equally true descriptively; neither statement is true in the explanatory and metaphysical meaning imputed to it.
The notion of causal explanation involved in both con¬ ceptions implies a breach in the continuity of historic process; the gulf created has then to be bridged by an emission or transfer of force. If one starts with the assumption that mind and matter are two separate things, whiie the evidence forces one to see that they are con¬ nected, one has no option save to attribute the power to