Hence the proverbial disparity between things in the scale of consciousness and in the scale of consequences is the most conclusive refutation of subjective idealism. The power of a momentary annoyance or flitting amuse¬ ment to distract a personage from an enduringly serious question is a familiar theme of comedy; a glass of wine or the whine of a mosquito may exclude issues of life and death. Any trivial thing may swell and swell, if it bothers us. To like effect are the standing complaints of moralists that men sacrifice the great good to the lesser, if the latter be close at hand; and their proclamation that reason and freedom are only found when the near-by and the remote good are weighed with equal balance. Trag¬ edy gives the same testimony. While doom impends the tragic hero fatally pursues his way, unheeding of the web closing in upon him, obvious to all others, and oblivious of what should be done to avert destructive destiny.
The immediately precarious, the point of greatest im¬ mediate need, defines the apex of consciousness, its intense or focal mode. And this is the point of re-direction, of re-adaptation, re- organization. Hence the aptness of James’s comparison of the course of consciousness to a stream, in spite of its intermittent character— a fact empirically recognized in his intimation of its rhythmic waxings and wanings —; of his insistence that only an object, not a concrete consciousness which is had twice, or which remains the same; of his analogy of focus and fringe; of his statement of its movements as a series of perchings and flights, of substantial and transitive phases; formeanings are condensed at the focus of imminent re-direction only to disappear as organization is effected, and yield place to another point of stress and weakness.
Empirical confirmation of this conception of conscious¬ ness is found in the extreme instability of every per¬ ceived object; the impossibility of excluding rapid and subtle change, except at the cost of inducing hypnotic sleep; the passage from being wide awake, awake, drowsy, dreaming and fast asleep, according as an organism is actively partaking, or abstaining from par¬ taking, in the course of events. All that goes by the name of “relativity” of consciousness is to precisely the same effect, including the Weberian principle; perceived changes are those which require a redirection of adaptive behavior. A prior adaptation constitutes a threshold (better called a platform or plateau); what is consciously noted is alteration of one plateau; re- adjustment to an¬ other. Similar events may mean cold at one time or place and warmth at another, depending upon the direc¬ tion of organic re-adaptation. Even a tooth-ache is unstable in consciousness for it is notoriously a matter of throbs, pulsations, palpitations, waxings and wanings of intensity, of organic protests and temporary deviations, and of enforced returns — of flights and perchings. The “tooth-ache” which does not change is not the perceived tooth-ache, but the cognitive object, the unperceived tooth to which the sequence of all changes is referred.
Confirmation of the hypothesis is found in the fact that wherever perceptual awareness occurs, there is a “mo¬ ment” of hesitation; there are scruples, reservations, in complete overt action. It seems quite probable that men of the executive type are those of the least subtle and variegated perceptual field; of the lowest degree of con¬ sciousness. having the steepest threshold to be crossed in order to induce a state of awareness. We have to “stop and think,” and we do not stop unless there is interference. The flood of action at high tide overrides all but the most considerable obstructions. It flows too forcibly and rapidly in one direction to be checked; without inhibition there are no hesitations, crises, alter¬ natives, need of re-direction. Overt action is an enstatement of established organic-environmental integrations. As long as these can maintain themselves, they do so; there is then no opportunity for transforming meaning into idea. In completely integrated function there is no room for distinction between things signifying and things signified. Only when behavior is divided within itself, do some of its factors have a subject-matter which stands for present tendencies and for their requirements or indi¬ cations and implications, while others factors stand for absent and remote objects which, in unifying and organiz¬ ing activity, complete the meaning of what is given at hand. The readier a response, the less consciousness, meaning, thinking it permits; division introduces mental confusion, but also, in need for redirection, opportunity for observation, recollection, anticipation.
There is then an empirical truth in the common opposi¬ tion between theory and practice, between the contem¬ plative, reflective type and the executive type, the “gogetter,” the kind that” “gets things done.” Itis.however. a contrast between two modes of practice. One is the pushing, slam-bang, act-first and think-afterwardsirinfle, to which events mav yield as they give wav to anv strong force. The other mode is wary, observant, sensitive to. slight hints and intimations; perhaps intriguing, timid jn public and ruthless in concealed action; perhaps over-cautious and inhibited, unduly subject to scrunles.
hesitancies, an ineffective Hamlet in performance; or per¬ haps achieving a balance between immediately urgent demands and remoter consequences, consistent and cumulative in action. In the latter case, there develops a field of perception, rich in hues and subtle in shades of meaning. In the degree in which this occurs, overt action is subordinated to the contribution it renders to sustaining and developing the scope of the conscious field. One lives on a conscious plane; thought guides activity, and perception is its reward. Action is not suppressed but is moderated. Like the scientific experi¬ menter, one acts not just to act, nor rashly, nor automatically, but with a consciousness of purpose and for the sake of learning. Intellectual hesitations and reserva¬ tions are used to expand and enrich the field of percep¬ tion, by means of rendering activity more delicate, and discriminatingly adapted.
The notion that highly thoughtful persons are incom¬ petent in action has its proper corrective in another atti¬ tude of belief which is expressed in such words as these: “No one can make you see this point; but unless you do see it, you won’t change your conduct; if you do get the point you will act differently.” The first notion, that thought paralyzes, refers to action in gross, the second re¬ lates to change in quality of action. Carry to an extreme the experiences indicated by the first proposition, and the result is the so-called automaton or epiphenomenal theory of consciousness; perception is an idle and superficial at¬ tachment to a mechanical play of energies. Carry the experiences involved in the other saying to an extreme, and you have the doctrine of the original creativeness of consciousness; it makes objects what they are.
Empirically the situation stands about like this: The use or intent of instruction, advice, admonition, and honest dialectic is to bring to awareness meanings hither¬ to unperceived, thereby constituting their ideas. The entanglements, misunderstandings and compromised un¬ derstandings of life are a sufficient commentary on the difficulties in the way of realizing this intent. But experi¬ ence demonstrates that as far as it is accomplished, con¬ duct is actually changed; to get a new meaning is per¬ force to be in a new attitude. This does not indicate that consciousness or perception is an entity which makes the difference. What follows is that perception or con¬ sciousness is, literally, the difference in process of making. Instruction and reproof that are not an idle flogging of the air involve an art of re-directing activity: given this redirection and there is emergence of change in meanings, or perception. There is here no question of priority or causal sequence; intentional change in direction of events is transforming change in the meaning of those events. We have at present little or next to no controlled art of securing that redirection of behavior which constitutes adequate perception or consciousness. That is, we have little or no art of education in the fundamentals, namely in the management of the organic attitudes which color the qualities of our conscious objects and acts.
As long as our chief psycho-physical coordinations are formed blindly and in the dark during infancy and early childhood, they are accidental adjustments to the pressure of other persons and of circumstances which act upon us. They do not then take into account the consequence of these activities upon formation of habits and habituations. Hence the connection between consciousness and action is precarious, and its possession a doubtful boon as compared with the efficacy of instinct — or structure — in lower animals. Energy is wasteful and misdirected; in the outcome we effect the opposite of what we intended. Consciousness is desultory and casual. Only when organic activity achieves a conscious plane shall we be adequately aware of what we are about. As long as our own fundamental psycho-physical attitudes in dealing with external things are subconscious, our conscious atten¬ tion going only to the relations of external things, so long will our perception of the external situations be subject at its root to perversion and vitiation. This state of affairs is the source of that apparent disconnection be¬ tween consciousness and action which strikes us when we begin to reflect. The connecting links between the two are in our own attitudes; while they remain unper¬ ceived, consciousness and behavior must appear to be independent of each other. Hence there will be empirical reason for isolating consciousness from natural events. When so isolated, some persons will assert that conscious¬ ness is a slavish and capricious shadow of things and others will proclaim that it is their rightful creator and master. Assertions, like those of this discussion, that consciousness is their recognized meaning when they are undergoing purposeful re-direction by means of organic activity will seem to lack full empirical evidence.
It remains to note and deal with two difficulties that have quite probably troubled the reader. In the first place, the discussion has explicitly gone on the basis that what is perceived are meanings, rather than just events or existences. In this respect, the view presented agrees with classic teaching, according to which perception, apprehension, lays hold of form, not of matter. I believe this view properly understood is inherently sound; the error in the classic theory lies in its accompanying assump¬ tion that all perceptions are intrinsically cognitive. In the second place, the identification of consciousness with perceptive awareness runs counter to the verbal usage of recent psychology and philosophy which limits perception to apprehension (usually valid) of contemporaneously occurring events in “real” space. The latter issue how¬ ever is not just a matter of propriety of language — about which it would be absurd to argue. It involves the conviction that perception of real things now exist¬ ing differs inherently from other modes of consciousness, such as emotion, thinking, remembering, fancy and imagi¬ nation. For this conviction, it must be explicitly noted, is contradicted by the conception which has been stated. According to the latter every mode of awareness — as distinct from “feeling” — in its immediate existence is exactly the same sort of thing, namely a remaking of meanings of events. The difference, it is implied, between awareness of present and “real” things and of absent and unreal is extrinsic, not intrinsic to a consciousness. The sequel will reveal that these two points are intimately connected with each other.
When it is denied that we are conscious of events as such it is not meant that we are not aware of objects. Objects are precisely what we are aware of. For objects are events with meanings; tables, the milky way, chairs, stars, cats, dogs, electrons, ghosts, centaurs, historic epochs and all the infinitely multifarious subject-matter of discourse designable by common nouns, verbs and their qualifiers. So intimate is the connection of meanings with consciousness that there is no great difficulty in resolving “consciousness,” as a recent original and ingenious thinker has done, into knots, intersections or complexes of universals.2 Serious difficulty sets in however when events are resolved into such combinations. The matter is referred to here not to be argued; but to indicate that a “realist” has gone even further than the theory now presented goes in identifying the subject-matter of which there is aware¬ ness with meanings, or at least with universals which, as simple subject-matter, colors, sounds, etc., and com¬ plex, plants, animals, atoms, etc., are precisely the same as meanings. To cause existences in their particularity to disappear into combinations of universals is at least an extreme measure. And the present thesis sticks to the common-sense belief that universals, relations, meanings, are of and about existences, not their exhaustive ingredi¬ ents. The same existential events are capable of an infinite number of meanings. Thus an existence identified as “paper,” because the meaning upper¬ most at the moment is “something to be written upon,” has as many other explicit meanings as it has important consequences recognized in the various connective interactions into which it enters. Since possibilities of conjunction are endless, and since the consequences of any of them may at some time be significant, its potential meanings are endless. It signi¬ fies something to start a fire with; something like snow; made of wood-pulp; manufactured for profit; property in the legal sense; a definite combination illustrative of cer¬ tain principles of chemical science; an article the inven- 2 Holt, The Concept of Consciousness.
tion of which has made a tremendous difference in human history, and so on indefinitely. There is no conceivable universe of discourse in which the thing may not figure, having in each its own characteristic meaning. And if we say that after all it is “paper” which has all these di 'erent meanings, we are at bottom but asserting that all the different meanings have a common existential reference, converging to the same event. We are virtually asserting t iat the existence whose usual, standardized meaning in discourse is paper, also has a multitude of other meanings; we are saying in effect that its existence is not exhausted in its being paper, although paper is its ordinary meaning for human intercourse.
Ghosts, centaurs, tribal gods, Helen of Troy and Ophelia of Denmark are as much the meanings of events as are flesh and blood, horses, Florence Nightingale and Madam Curie. This statement does not mark a dis¬ covery; it enunciates a tautology. It seems questionable only when its significance is altered; when it is taken to denote that, because they are all meanings of events, they all are the same kind of meaning with respect to validity of reference. Because perception of a ghost does not signify a subtle, intangible form, filling space as it moves about, it does not follow that it may not signify some other existential happening like disordered nerves; a religious animistic tradition; or, as in the play of Hamlet, that it may not signify an enhancement of the meaning of a moving state of affairs. The existential events that form a drama have their own characteristic meanings, which are not the less meanings of those events because their import is dramatic, not authentically cognitive. So when men gather in secret to plot a conspiracy, their plans are not the less meanings of certain events because they have not been already carried out; and they remain meanings of events even if the conspiracy comes to naught.
The proposition that the perception of a horse is objec¬ tively valid and that of a centaur fanciful and mythical does not denote that one is a meaning of natural events and the other is not. It denotes that they are meanings referable to different natural events, and that confused and harmful consequences result from attributing them to the same events. The idea that the consciousness of a horse as now present and of a centaur differ as percep¬ tions, or states of awareness, is an illustration of the harm wrought by introspective psychology, which, here as elsewhere, treats relationships of objects as if they were inherent qualities of an immediate subject-matter, ignor¬ ing the fact that causal relationships to unperceived things are involved. The matter of the cognitive validity of the horse-perception and the cognitive invalidity of the cen¬ taur-perception is not an affair of intrinsic difference in the two perceptions, which inspection of the two states of awareness as such can ever bring to light; it is a causal matter, brought to light as we investigate the causal antecedents and consequents of the events having the meanings.
In other words, the difference between assertion of a perception, belief in it, and merely having it is an extrinsic difference; the belief, assertion, cognitive reference is something additive, never merely immediate. Genuinely to believe the centaur-meaning is to assert that events characterized by it interact in certain ways with other now unperceived events. Since belief that centaur has the same kind of objective meaning as has horse denotes expectation of like efficacies and consequences, the differ¬ ence of validity between them is extrinsic. It is capable of being revealed only by the results of acting upon them. The awareness of centaur meaning is fanciful not simply because part of its conditions lie within the organism; part of the conditions of any perception, valid as well as invalid, scientific as well as esthetic, lie within the organ¬ ism. Nor is it fanciful, simply because it is supposed not to have adequate existential antecedents. Natural conditions, physiological, physical and social, may be specified in one case as in the other. But since the con¬ ditions in the two cases are different, consequences are bound to be different. Knowing, believing, involves something additive and extrinsic to having a meaning.
No knowledge is ever merely immediate. The proposi¬ tion that the perception of a horse is valid and that a centaur is fanciful or hallucinatory, does not denote that there are two modes of awareness, differing intrinsically from each other. It denotes something with respect to causation, namely, that while both have their adequate antecedent conditions, the specific causal conditions are ascertained to be different in the two cases. Plence it denotes something with respect to consequences, namely, that action upon the respective meanings will bring to light (to apparency or awareness) such different kinds of consequences that we should use the two meanings in very different ways. Both acts and consequences lie outside the primary perceptions; both have to be dili¬ gently sought for and tested. Since conditions in the two cases are different, they operate differently. That is, they belong to different histories, and the matter of the history to which a given thing belongs is just the matter with which knowledge is concerned. The conscious or perceived affair is itself a consequence of antecedent con¬ ditions. But were this conscious or apparent (evident, focal) consequence the only consequence of the conditions, if there were not other as yet unapparent consequences, we should have absolutely no way to tell in what sequence of events a perception belongs, and hence absolutely no way of determining its validity or cognitive standing. It is because conditions which generate the perception of a horse have other and different consequences than the perception (and similarly of those which generate the idea of the centaur), that it is possible to make a distinction between the value in knowledge of the two ideas. By discovering the different sequential affairs to which they respectively belong we can differentiate their import for knowledge. Failure to recognize this fact is the ulti¬ mate condemnation, it may be remarked in passing, of idealistic theories of knowledge, which identify it with im¬ mediate consciousness. If an all-inclusive consciousness were to exist, it would be a piece of esthetic scenery, interesting or tedious as the case might be, but having no conceivable cognitive standing.
That a perception is cognitive means, accordingly, that it is used; it is treated as a sign of conditions that impli¬ cate other as yet unperceived consequences in addition to the perception itself. That a perception is truly cognitive means that its active use or treatment is followed by consequences which fit appropriately into the other con¬ sequences which follow independently of its being per¬ ceived. To discover that a perception or an idea is cognitively invalid is to find that the consequences which follow from acting upon it entangle and confuse the other consequences which follow from the causes of the percep¬ tion, instead of integrating or coordinating harmoniously with them. The special technique of scientific inquiry may be defined as consisting of procedures which make it pos¬ sible to perceive the eventual agreement or disagreement of the two sets of consequences. For experience proves that it is possible for great disparity between them to exist, and yet the conflict not be perceived or else be explained away as of no importance.
Common-sense has no great occasion to distinguish between bare events and objects; objects being eventswith-meanings. Events are present and operative any¬ way; what concerns us is their meanings expressed in expectations, beliefs, inferences, regarding their potentiali¬ ties. The nearest approach that occurs in ordinary life to making the distinction is when there occurs some brute, dumb shock, which we are constrained to interpret, to assign meaning to, that is, to convert into an object. Such situations supply direct empirical evidence of the difference between events and objects; but common-sense does not need to formulate the difference as a distinction. Events have effects or consequences anyway; and since meaning is awareness of these consequences before they actually occur, reflective inquiry which converts an event into an object is the same thing as finding out a meaning which the event already possesses by imputation. It is the essence of common sense, one might say, to treat potentialities as given actualities; since its interest is universally practical, bent upon fruitage, there is no need to note its bent in any particular case. The eventual outcome is for it the “reality” of the present situation.
But not so with philosophic discourse. Philosophy must explicitly note that the business of reflection is to take events which brutely occur and brutely affect us, to convert them into'objects by means of inference as to their probable consequences. These are the meanings imputed to the events under consideration. Otherwise philosophy finds itself in a hopeless impasse. For, apart from making a distinction between events and objects, it has no way of differentiating cognitive from esthetic and literary mean¬ ings, and within cognitive meanings it has no way of distinguishing the valid from the invalid. The outcome of failure in this respect is exemplified in those discussions which find an inherent and generic cognitive problem in the occurrence of dreams, reveries and hallucinations, a problem other than the scientific one of ascertaining their antecedents and effects. For if intrinsic cognitive intent is ascribed to all perceptions, or forms of awareness, which are alleged to pick out a “reality” to which they refer as an image or sign, dreams, etc., have to be squared to this assumption. Draw the distinction between events and objects, and dream-objects are just what they are, events with one kind of meaning, while scientific-objects are just what they are, events with another kind of meaning, a kind that involves an extrinsic and additive function not contained in dream-objects.
In formulating the distinction between existences and objects of reference, whether cognitive, esthetic or moral, philosophy does not exact that violent break with com¬ mon sense which is found in the assertion of idealism that events themselves are composed of meanings. Nor does it involve that break with common sense found in episte¬ mological realism, with its assertion of a direct dealing of mind with naked existences unclothed by the inter¬ vention of meanings. Philosophy has only to state, to make explicit, the difference between events which are challenges to thought and events which have met the challenge and hence possess meaning. It has only to note that bare occurrence in the way of having, being, or undergoing is the provocation and invitation to thought — seeking and finding unapparent connections, so that think¬ ing terminates when an object is present: namely, when a challenging event is endowed with stable meanings through relationship to something extrinsic but connected.
There is nothing new in the facts contained in this state¬ ment. It was an axiom of the classic theory that form, not matter, is the object of knowledge. And many other theories, in spite of the violence with which they nominally protest against the statement that existences as such are not the objects of knowledge, contain the essential facts, though in an incredible form. It is straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel to balk at the proposition that we mentally are concerned with events in their meanings and not in themselves, and at the same time to welcome the proposition that the immediate objects of all conscious¬ ness are sensations and complexes of sensations, termed images or ideas. For if by sensations (or by sensa) is meant not mere shocks in feeling, but something qualita¬ tive and capable of objective reference, then sensations are but one class of meanings. They are a class of mean¬ ings which embody the mature results of elaborate experi¬ mental inquiry in tracing out causal dependencies and rela¬ tionships. This inquiry depends upon prior possession of a system of meanings, physical theories of light, sound, etc., and of knowledge of nervous structures and functions.
The alleged primacy of sensory meanings is mythical. They are primary only in logical status; they are primary as tests and confirmation of inferences concerning matters of fact, not as historic originals. For, while it is not usu¬ ally needful to carry the check or test of theoretical calcu¬ lations to the point of irreducible sensa, colors, sounds, etc., these sensa form a limit approached in careful analy¬ tic certifications, and upon critical occasions it is neces¬ sary to touch the limit. The transformation of these ulterior checking meanings into existential primary data is but another example of domination by interest in results and fruits, plus the fallacy which converts a functional office into an antecedent existence. Sensa are the class of irreducible meanings which are employed in verifying and correcting other meanings. We actually set out with much coarser and more inclusive meanings and not till we have met with failure from their use do we even set out to discover those ultimate and harder meanings which are sensory in character.
The theory that awareness is intrinsically possessed of cognitive reference and intent is Protean in the forms it has assumed in the history of thought. One of these forms, that knowledge is recognition, is worth special attention. The idea that the act of knowing is always one of recognizing or noting is certain to lead the mind astray; dialectically, it breaks upon the impos¬ sibility entailed of instituting an initial act of know¬ ing; it commits its holder to a Platonic prior intuition in the realm of eternity. It is easy to see, however, how the idea suggested itself and gained credence. Recognition, identified and distinguished meaning, is an indispensable condition of effective experience. It is a prerequisite of successful practise; except in so far as the situation in which we are to act is distinguished as having a notable character, behavior is hopelessly at a loss. It is a pre¬ requisite to an act of knowing; for without possession of a recognized meaning, there is nothing to know with; there is no indication of the direction inquiry has to take, or of the universe within which inquiry falls. But, recogni¬ tion is not cognition. It is what the word implicitly conveys; re-cognition; not in the sense that an act of cognizing is repeated, but in the sense that there is a re¬ minder of the meaning in which a former experience terminated, and which may be used as an acceptable tool in further activities.
Most theories of knowing which define a knowledge as an immediate noting seem at bottom to rest upon a con¬ fusion of widely differing acts: one that of taking cogni¬ zance, which means to pay heed to the apparent in terms of non-apparent consequences; and the other that of being re-minded of something previously known, which is then used in the act of true, inferential, cognition. Recognition is re-instatement of a meaning vouched for in some other situation, plus a sense of familiarity, of immediate greet¬ ing of welcome or aversion. It is exemplified in the experience of revisiting the scenes of childhood, with the emotional responses which familiar scenes evoke; it is found in the acknowledgements of the thoroughly practi¬ cal man, who deferentially notes a character of existence as something which, as a practical man, he must take into account in planning his conduct. Recognition is a nod, either of voluntary piety or of coerced respect, not a knowing.
There is another theory which makes “acquaintance” the primary mode of knowledge, and which treats acquaintance-knowledge as wholly immediate. Ac¬ quaintance is empirically distinguished from knowing about a thing, and from knowing that a thing is thus and so. It is genuinely cognitive. But it has its distinctive features because it involves something more than bare presence of an identified meaning; it involves expectancy which is an extrinsic reference; it involves a judgment as to what the object of acquaintance will do in connec¬ tion with other events. To be acquainted with a man is at least to “know him by sight” as we truly say; it is to use- a meaning conditioned by present vision to form a supposition about something not seen: how the man will behave under other circumstances than those of just being seen. To be acquainted with a man is to forecast his general life of conduct; it is to have insight into character. And insight, as distinct from sight, means that sight is employed to form inferences regarding what is not seen. It passes beyond apparition of meaning. The difference between acquaintance and “knowing