about” or “knowing that” is genuine, but it is not a differ¬ ence between two kinds of knowledge, one immediate and the other mediate. The difference is an affair of accom¬ paniments, contexts and modes of response. The greater intimacy and directness that marks acquaintance is practical and emotional not logical. To be acquainted with anything is to have the kind of expectancy of its consequences which constitutes an immediate readiness to act, an adequate preparatory adjustment to whatever the thing in question may do. To know about it is to have a kind of knowledge which does not pass into direct response until some further term has been supplied. Direct readi¬ ness to act involves a sense of community; postponed readiness a sense of aloofness. Where there is acquaint¬ ance, there is an immediate emotion of participation in the situations in which the object of acquaintance en¬ gages, sympathetic or antipathetic according as readiness takes the form of a disposition to favor or to hinder. Knowledge about a historic or literary figure passes into acquaintance when one arrives at a point of imaginative foresight of his prospective conduct and dramatically shares in it. Knowledge that the earth is round becomes acquaintance when, in some juncture of experience, the meaning comes home to us, as we say, or we get a “realiz¬ ing sense” of it. Acquaintance, then, instead of being a mode of knowledge prior to knowledge about and know¬ ledge that, marks a later stage in which the latter attain full sense and efficacy.
It follows that theories which identify knowledge with acquaintance, recognition, definition and classification give evidence, all the better for being wholly unintended, that we know not just events but events-with-meanings. To assert that knowledge is classification is to assert in effect that kind, character, has overlaid and over ridden bare occurrence and existence. To say that to know is to define is to recognize that wherever there is knowledge there is explicitly present a universal. To hold that cognition is recognition to concede that likeness, a rela¬ tion, rather than existence, is central. And to be ac¬ quainted with anything is to be aware what it is like, in what sort of ways it is likely to behave. These features, character, kind, sort, universal, likeness, fall within the universe of meaning. Hence the theories which make them constitutive of knowledge acknowledge that having meanings is a prerequisite for knowing. This prerequisite, being universally required, has loomed so large that thinkers have been led to slur over the concrete differential quality of knowledge — a particular act of taking, using, responding to, the meanings involved. That curious piece of traditional “analytic” psychology in accordance with which all knowing is a fusion or association of sensation with images is more testimony in the same direction; “associated imagery” being a round about equivalent of events with meaning.
Finally, the notion that knowledge is contemplation is likewise accounted for. To contemplate is con¬ sciously to possess meanings; to behold them with relish; to view them so absorbingly as to revel in them. It is a name for the perception of significant characters, plus an emphatic allusion to an accompanying esthetic emotion. Hypotheses which, like the one advanced in this book and chapter, hold that no knowing takes place without an overt act of taking and employing things on the basis of their meanings, have been attacked as over¬ devoted to keeping busy; as ignoring the place and charm of contemplation. Well, contemplation assuredly has a place. But when it is ultimate, and is a fruition, knowing has stepped out of the picture; the vision is esthetic. This may be better than knowing; but its being better is no reason for mixing different things and attributing to knowledge characters belonging to an esthetic object. Omit the esthetic phase, the absorbing charm of contem¬ plation, and what remains for a theory of knowledge is that meanings must be had before they can be used as means of bringing to apparition meanings now obscure and hidden.
If I were allowed to call to the witness stand but one historic theory to give testimony to prove that while there is no knowing without perception of meaning, yet that having meanings and rolling them over as sweet mor¬ sels under the tongue are not knowing, I should summon the venerable doctrine that knowledge is contemplation.
Another difficulty involved in the theory was men¬ tioned; a difficulty contained in the fact that recent theo¬ ries have limited the signification of perception. In its older usage, it designated any awareness, any “seeing” whether of objects, ideas, principles, conclusions or what¬ ever. In recent literature it is usually restricted to ‘ ‘senseperception.” There can be no quarrel about the meaning of words except a lexicographical quarrel. The issue at stake concerns then not the appropriate use of a word; it concerns certain matters of fact which are implied or usually associated with the present restricted usage. These implications are two: First, there exists a mode of consciousness or awareness which is original, primitive, simple, and which refers immediately and intrinsically to things in space external to the organism at the time of perception. Secondly, this reference is originally, and ex proprio motu, cognitive. Now as against these implica¬ tions, the theory which has been advanced asserts that awareness in the form of auditory and visual perception is, whenever it is cognitive, just as much a matter of infer¬ ential judgment, an instance of a way of taking and using meanings, as is any proposition found in the science of physics.
In its general features, argument as to this point is to the same effect as that of the point just discussed. But we may avoid repetition and introduce greater specification by confining ourselves to the factual traits charac¬ teristic of perceptions of present objects in space; showing that these, when they are cognitive, are highly selected and artful instances of awareness, not primitive and innocent. The current theory begins with a distinction between peripherally initiated and centrally initiated awareness. Peripheral initiation is the defining mark of such operations as are designated “perceptions.” But awarenesses do not come to us labelled “I am caused by an event initiated on the surface of the body by other bodies”; and “I on the contrary originate in an intraorganic event only indirectly connected with surfacechanges.” The distinction is one made by analytic and classifying thought. This fact is enough to place in doubt the notion that some modes of consciousness are originally and intrinsically “sense-perception.”
Moreover, there is no absolute separation between the skin and the interior of the body. No sooner is the dis¬ tinction drawn than it has to be qualified. As a matter of fact there is no such thing as an exclusively peripherally initiated nervous event. Internal conditions, those of hunger, blood-circulation, endocrine functions, persist¬ ences of prior activities, pre-existent opened and blocked neuronic connections, together with a multitude of other intra-organic factors enter into the determination of a peripheral occurrence. And after the peripheral excita¬ tion has taken place, its subsequent career is not selfdetermined, but is affected by literally everything going on within the organism. It is pure fiction that a “sensa¬ tion”, or peripheral excitation, or stimulus, travels undis¬ turbed in solitary state in its own coach-and-four to enter the brain or consciousness in its purity. A particular excitation is but one of an avalanche of contemporane¬ ously occurring excitations, peripheral and from proprio¬ ceptors; each has to compete with others, to make terms with them; what happens is an integration of complex forces.
It requires therefore a highly technical apparatus of science to discriminate the exact place and nature of a peripheral stimulation, and to trace its normal course to just the junction point where it becomes effective for redirection of activity and thus capable of perception. “Peripheral origin” marks an interpretation of events, a discrimination scientifically valid and important, but no more an original datum than is the spectrum of Betelgeuse. The same thesis holds good, of course, of the “conscious¬ ness” corresponding to the centrally initiated processes. To suppose that there are inherently marked off different forms of awareness corresponding to the distinction arrived at by technical analysis is as flagrant a case of hypostatizing as can be found. The theory that certain kinds or forms of consciousness intrinsically have an intellectual or cognitive reference to things present in space is merely the traditional theory that knowledge is an immediate grasp of Being, clothed in the terminology of recent physiology. While it is offered as if it were estab¬ lished by physiological and psychological research, in reality it presents an intellectual hold-over, a notion picked up from early teachings which have not been subjected to any critical examination; physiology and psychology merely afford a vocabulary with which to deck out an unconscionable survival.
Reference to peripheral stimulation of eye or ear or skin or nose is, whether of the simpler and popular kind or of the more complex neurological kind, part of the technique of checking up the particular sort of extrinsic reference which should be given to an idea; discovery whether it is to be referred to a past, contemporary or future thing, or treated as due to wish and emotion. Even so, ascer¬ tainment of mode of stimulation and origin is always secondary and derived. We do not believe a thing to be “there” because we are directly cognizant of an external origin for our perception; we infer some external stimula¬ tion of our sensory apparatus because we are successfully engaged in motor response. Only when the latter fails, do we turn back and examine the matter of sensory stimu¬ lation. To say that I am now conscious of a typewriter as the source of sensory stimuli is to make a back-handed and sophisticated statement of the fact that I am engaged in active employment of the typewriter to produce cer¬ tain consequences, so that what I am aware of is these consequences and the relation to them of parts of the type¬ writer as means of producing them. As matter of fact, we never perceive the peripheral stimuli to which we are at that given time responding.
The notion that these stimuli are the appropriate and normal objects of simple original perceptions represents, as we have just said, an uncritical acceptance by psychol¬ ogists of an old logical and metaphysical dogma, one having neither origin nor justification within scientific psychol¬ ogy. We are aware only of stimuli to other responses than those which we are now making; we become aware of them when we analyze some performed total act to dis¬ cover the mechanism of its occurrence. To become aware of an optical or auditory stimulation involved in an act signifies that we now apprehend that an organic change is part of the means used in the act, so that soundness of its structure and working is requisite to efficient performance of the act. I do not usually, for example, hear the sounds made by the striking of the keys; hence I therefore bang at them or strike them unevenly. If I were better trained or more intelligent in the performance of this action, I should hear the sounds, for they would have ceased to be just stimuli and become means of direction of my behavior in securing conse¬ quences. Not having learned by the “touch-method,” my awareness of contact-qualities as I hit the keys is intermittent and defective. Physiological stimulation of fingers is involved as a condition of my motor response; yet there is no consciousness of contact “sensations” or sensa. But if I used my sensory touch appreciation as means to the proper execution of the act of writing, I should be aware of these qualities. The wider and freer the employment of means, the larger the field of sensory perceptions.
It is usual in current psychology to assert or assume that qualities observed are those of the stimulus. This as¬ sumption puts the cart before the horse; qualities which are observed are those attendant upon response to stimuli We are observantly aware (in distinction from inferentially aware) only of what has been done; we can perceive what is already there, what has happened. By description, a stim¬ ulus is not an object of perception, for stimulus is corre¬ lative to response, and is undetermined except as response occurs. I am not questioning as a fact of knowledge that certain things are the stimuli of visual and auditor}' per¬ ception. I am pointing out that we are aware of the stimuli only in terms of our response to them and of the consequences of this response. Argument as to the impossibility of stimuli being the object of perception is of course dia¬ lectical; like all dialectic arguments it is not convincing if confronted with facts to the contrary. But facts agree.
The whiteness of the paper upon which words are being written and the blackness of the letters have been con¬ stantly operative stimuli in what I have been doing. It is equally certain that they have not been constantly perceived objects. If I have perceived them from time to time, it is in virtue of prior responses of which they were consequences, and because of the need of employing these attained consequences as means in further action. In the laboratory, as in the painter’s studio, colors are spe¬ cific objects of perception. But as perceived, they are “stimuli” only proleptically and by a shift in the universe of discourse.3 The color now and here perceived, in consequence of an organic adjustment to other stimuli than color, is in subsequent situations a stimulus to other modes of behavior, unconscious in so far as just a stimu¬ lus; conscious as far as a deliberately utilized means.
When color is perceived as it is, say, for painting or for matching colors in selection of dress goods, or in an esti¬ mate of the harmonious value of the hue of a wall-paper, or for determining from a spectral line the nature of a chemical substance. It signifies that we are responding in such a way as to form or bring into being a stimulus adequate to operate without being perceived. But in the meantime in consciousness it is means to an act which 3 The shift is evident in the fact that stimuli are stated as vibrations or electro-magnetic disturbance or in similar fashion; now vibrations are not observed while color the consequence, the effected coordination, is in direct consciousness.
will effect desired consequences. Shall this color be used? Will this particular piece of goods or pattern of wall paper serve the purpose in view? When such questions are determined, a final stimulus is achieved. What is then perceived is either some further consequence, or this consequence as a means in a new predicament, such as wearing the goods, hanging the wall-paper. The consciousness of stimuli marks the conclusion of an inves¬ tigation, not an original datum; and what is discovered is not the stimuli to that act, the inquiry, but to some other act, past or prospective, and it marks the conversion of de facto stimulus into potential means. The question of stimuli is a question of existential causation; and if Hume’s lesson had been learned as well as we flatter ourselves it is learned, we should be aware that any matter of causation refers to something extrinsic, to be reached by inquiry and inference.
We conclude, therefore, that while the word “percep¬ tion” may be limited to designate awareness of objects contemporaneously affecting the bodily organs, there is no ground whatever for the assumption which has usually attended this narrowing of the older meaning of the word: namely, that sense-perception has intrinsic properties or qualities marking it off from other forms of consciousness. Much less is there justification for the assumption that such perceptions are the original form of elementary awareness from which other forms of cognitive conscious¬ ness develop. On the contrary sensory-perceptual mean¬ ings are specifically discriminated objects of awareness; the discrimination takes place in the course of inquiry into causative conditions and consequences; the ultimate need for the inquiry is found in the necessity of discovering what is to be done, or of developing a response suitably adapted to the requirements of a situation. When inquiry reveals that an object external to the organ¬ ism is now operative and affecting the organism, the per¬ tinency of overt action is established and the kind of overt adjustment that should be made is in evidence. Perceptual meanings (sensory-perceptual) contrast with other meanings in that either (a) the latter cannot be overtly acted upon now or immediately, but only at a deferred time, when specified conditions now absent have been brought into being — conceptual meanings —; or (b) that the latter are such that action upon them at any time must be of a dramatic or literary or playful sort — non-cognitive meanings. The necessities of behavior enforce very early in life the difference between acts demanded at once, and those pertinent only at a later time; yet making and refining the distinction is a matter of constant search and discovery, not, as the traditional theory presumes, an original and ready-made affair.
Thus we returned to the statement that apart from considerations of use and history there are no original and inherent differences between valid meanings and meanings occurring in revery, desiring, fearing, remem¬ bering, all being intrinsically the same in relation to events. This fact contains in gist the condemnation of introspec¬ tion.4 It makes no difference in principle whether the introspective doctrine takes a dialectical form, as in the Cartesian-Spinozistic logical realism in which intrinsic 4 It is not asserted that observations called introspection have never given results. It is claimed that in such cases, the procedure does not conform to the theoretical definition of immediate inspection but involves the results of inquiries into relationships with things not directly present.
self-evidency, clearness, adequacy, or truth, are imputed to some conceptual meanings or ideas; or whether it takes the more usual form of assigning to things appear¬ ing in the field of consciousness intrinsic properties which may be read off by direct inspection and thereby used to denominate them as sensory, perceptual, concep¬ tual, imaginative, fantastic, memory, emotional, voli¬ tional, etc. It is asserted that in every case, the basis of classification is extrinsic, an affair dependent upon a study, often hard to make, of generating conditions and of subsequent careers. The denominations are interpretations, and like all interpretations are adequate only when con¬ trolled by wide and accurate information as to bodies of fact that are remote and extraneous. It is not too much to say that the introspective doctrine — much wider in logical scope than so-called introspective psychology — is the last desperate stand and fortress of the classic doc¬ trine that knowledge is immediate grasp, intuition, envisagement, possession. It is this fact which constitutes the importance of the views that have been criticized. Until they have been criticized, until the assumption of immediate intrinsic differences in the meaning-objects of sensory perceptions, reveries, dreams, desires, emotions, has been expelled, the actual relation of ideas to existences must remain an obscure and confused matter.
If one looks at the net results of physiological inquiry upon psychologist insight, one seems bound to conclude that while potentially they are enormous, actually they consist largely in making more emphatic and conspicu¬ ous the old metaphysical problem of the relation of mind and body, and in strengthening a leaning to the parallelistic hypothesis. The explanation is that they have not been used for what they really are: an important part of our scientific resources with respect to the intelligent conduct of behavior in general, and the discrimination in particular of various kinds of meanings from one another. It is one thing to employ, for example, the distinction between central and peripheral origin of the existence of this and that idea as part of the technique of determining their respective cognitive validities, and quite another to assume that ideas and conscious contents are already intrinsically marked off in themselves (and there¬ fore for direct observation or introspection), and that the problem is simply to find physiological equivalents for their distinction. As far as it is assumed that modes of consciousness are in themselves already differentiated into sensory, perceptual, conceptual, imaginative, retentive, emotional, conative (or may be so discriminated by direct inspection), physiological study will consist simply of search for the different bodily and neural processes that underlie these differences. The outcome is an exacer¬ bation of the traditional mind-body problem; the doctrine of parallelism, instead of being either a scientific discov¬ ery or a scientific postulate, is merely a formulation of the original psychological ready-made distinctions plus a more detailed knowledge of physical existential conditions of their occurrence.
If the problem is put as one of a more adequate control of behavior through knowledge of its mechanism, the situation becomes very different. How should we treat a particular meaning: as sound datum for inference, as an effect of habit irrespective of present condition, as an instance of desire, or a consequence of hope or fear, a token of some past psycho-physical maladjustment, or how? Such questions as these are urgent questions in the conduct of life. They are typical of questions which we must find a way of answering if we are to achieve any method of mastering our own behavior similar to that which we have achieved in respect to heat and electricity, coal and iron. And knowledge of the conditions under which our meanings and our modes of taking and using them organically occur is an indispensable portion of the technique of dealing with such questions. In princi¬ ple, there is no difference between the neurological inquiry and those astronomical inquiries which enable an astrono¬ mer to determine the standing and import of some idea in his universe of discourse. The physiological inquiries no more involve a peculiar problem of mind-body than do the astronomical inquiries. Their subject-matter is part of the objective matter-of-fact considerations which extend and buttress inferential conclusions. In concrete subjectmatter, they differ, being concerned with organic struc¬ tures and processes; but this is only a difference in con¬ crete subject-matter, like that between astronomical and botanical. The peculiar importance of the physio¬ logical material is that in some form it enters as a factor into the occurrence of every meaning and every act, including the astronomical and botanical.
We return, accordingly, from this excursion to the assertion that the objects of revery-consciousness are just as much cases of perceived meanings or ideas of events as are those of sensory perceptual consciousness. Only — they are not as good objects with respect to direction of subsequent conduct, including the conduct of knowledge. Revery-consciousness, and the influence upon beliefs of affective wishes of which we are not aware, are facts crucial for any theory of consciousness. If they support the hypothesis that all consciousness is awareness of meanings, they also seem at first sight to contradict the supposition that the meanings perceived are those of natural events. Since their objects are notoriously “un¬ real,” they seem to support the notion that consciousness is disconnected from physical events, and that any valid connection which may be set up, either in practical con¬ duct or in knowing, is adventitious.
There is indeed much to be said for the view that con¬ sciousness is originally a dream-like, irresponsible efflores¬ cence, and that it gains reference to actual events in nature only under stern compulsion, and by way of accidental coincidence. There are elements of truth in this view, as against the orthodox tradition which makes consciousness architectonic, having righteous and rational conformity as the corner stone of its structure. Ideas, ob¬ jects of immediate awareness, are too desultory, fantastic, and impertinent to be consistent with the classic tradition, whether of the sensationalistic or the rationalistic schools. But the view of complete separation of existential con¬ sciousness from connection with physical things cannot be maintained in view of what is known of its specifiable connections with organic conditions, and of the intimate, unbroken connection of organic with extra-organic events. It can be maintained only by holding that the connection of consciousness in its varied forms with bodily action is non-natural. The only reason for asserting this position lies in the dialectic compulsion of denial of quality to natural events, and arrogation of superior existence to causal antecedents.
Given the connection of meanings with environmentalorganic integrations (including those of social intercourse) and there is nothing surprising that consciousness should often be of the revery and wish type. We find no great occasion for wonder in the fact that a person who has been taught that the sun moves around the earth, rising above it at sunrise and going under it at sunset, should himself hold that belief. Well, past consummatory experi¬ ences have taught the individual many things; they have taught him what conjunctions are agreeable and what dis¬ agreeable. Just as past teaching regarding sun and earth have conditioned subsequent behavior, have produced organic modifications in the way of habit which influence subsequent reactions, including interpretations, so with what was taught by having been implicated in a consum¬ matory union of environment and organism. Here too a bias in organic modification is set up; it acts to perpetuate, wherever possible, awareness of fruitions, and to avert perception of frustrations and inconvenient interruptions.
A consciousness which is set on the outside over against the course of nature, which is not a partaker in its moving changes, would have to conform to one or other of two schemes. In one alternative, the consciousness of such a being would be gifted with an infallible spectatorship conjoined with perfect innocency of impartial recordership; it would see and report the world exactly as if it were itself knowingly engaged in producing what it saw and reported. Or, in the other alternative, all conscious¬ ness would be so completely irrelevant to the world of which it is outside and beyond, that there would be no common denominator or common multiple. Obviously facts do not agree with either of these suppositions. We dream, but the material of our dream life is the stuff of our waking life. Revery is not first wholly detached from objects of purposeful action and belief, coming later by discipline to acquire reference to them. Its objects con¬ sist of the objects of daily concern subjected to a strange perspective, perverted in behalf of a bias. Such empiri¬ cal facts as these, or the fact that the world of fancy is the ordinary world as we like it to be, as we find it agree¬ able, is fatal to any theory which seriously asserts the wholesale irrelevance of the material of consciousness to the things of the actual world. Irrelevance exists, but it is relative and specifiable. An idea or emotion is irrelevant not as such, through and through, but because it is a version of the meaning of events which if it were differently edited would be relevant to actions in the world to which it belongs.
To par-take and to per-ceive are allied performances. To perceive is a mode of partaking which occurs only under complex conditions and with its own defining traits. Everything of importance hangs upon what particular one of the many possible ways of partaking is employed in a given situation. The organism, wherever possible, participates a son gre; its taste and bias are conditioned, in the degree of its susceptibility and retentiveness, upon prior satisfactions. If a man has experienced a world which is good, why should not he act to remake a bad world till it agrees with the good world which he has once possessed? And if the task of overt transformation is too great for his powers, why should he not at least act so as to get the renewed sense of a good world? These questions express the working logic of human action; the first, the way of objective transformation, is the method of action in the arts and sciences; the second, of action that is fanciful, “wish-fulfilling, ” romantic, myth¬ making.
The immense difference between the two modes of action has had to be learned. There is no original and intrinsic difference in the respective modes of conscious¬ ness accompanying the two kinds of acts. In some mat¬ ters, the lesson is readily and quickly learned. Such matters constitute the objects of usual every-day senseperception, the objects of common-sense. Certain organicintegrations have to occur if life is to continue. Suste¬ nance must be had; destructive enemies must be kept away;