the help of others must be availed of. Meanings and ideas connected with these organic-environmental adjust¬ ments are substantially sound as far as adjustments are successfully made — and within limits they are ordinarily so made, or life ceases. Such gross ideas as a world of things and persons external to our personal wishes and fancies, and as the continuance of energies once set in motion, are so recurrently and emphatically taught that they are never sincerely doubted. Ideas of specific fea¬ tures of this external world (external to us, since it exacts so much of us in effort before it conforms to the needs that are most deeply ourselves), ideas of fire, food, furni¬ ture, weather and crops, of our friends and enemies, and of our own past and probable future, are so repeatedly presented in the connections of actions and so confirmed by consequences that they become matters of course, substantially valid. They thus form a kind of privileged domain, which, although an island in a sea of ideas where ground is not readily touched, has been by too hasty and impatient theories taken to form the original and inherent constitution of consciousness. In consequence, there is added to genuine natural realism which accepts the casual connection of ideas with events and their po¬ tential reference to subsequent events, a specious realistic theory which takes the island for a solid and complete continent. Characteristic traits of the whole continent of mind are then looked upon as if they were only in¬ cidental faults and dislocations, to be explained away by dialectic ingenuity; or when the strata of fancy, illusion, error and misinterpretation are realized, wholesale scep¬ ticism is indulged in.
Gradually the technique involved in making ordinary organic-environmental adjustments is discovered, and becomes capable of extension to cases where fancy had previously reigned. A larger and larger field of ideas becomes susceptible of analytic objective reference, with the promise of approximate validity. The secret of this technique lies in control of the ways in which the organ¬ ism participates in the course of events. In the case of simple needs and simple environments, existing organic structures practically enforce correct participation; the result is so-called instinctive action. Within this range, modifications undergone by the organism form in the main effective habits. But organic preparation for varied situation having many factors and wide-reaching conse¬ quences is not so easily attained. Effective participa¬ tion here depends upon the use of extra-organic conditions, which supplement structural agencies; namely, tools and other persons, by means of language spoken and recorded. Thus the ultimate buttress of the soundness of all but the simplest ideas consists in the cumulative objective appli¬ ances and arts of the community, not in anything found in “consciousness” itself or within the organism.
If any evidence be needed of the artificial character of strictly epistemological discussion it may be found in the fact that it goes on exclusively in terms of an alleged direct contact of “subject” and “object,” with total neglect of all the indispensable tools of checking spontaneous beliefs and developing sound ones in their place. Pendu¬ lums, lenses, prisms, yard sticks, and pound weights and multiplication and logarithmic tables have a great deal more to do with valid knowing, since they enable the organism to partake with other things in the effecting of consequences, than have bare consciousness or brain and nerves. Without such objective resources to direct the manner of engaging in responsive adaptations, ideas, outside a simple range of constantly tested actions, are at the mercy of any peculiarity of organic constitution and of circumstance; myths are rife and the world is peopled with fabulous personages and is the home of occult forces. Since organic modifications due to past consummatory objects are dominant, since they lead an individual to find or make a world congenial to them; and since man is most at home with his fellows, whether friends or enemies, the world is then taken animistically for the most part. Too many of the traditional ideas of fife, soul, mind, spirit, and consciousness, and of the cosmos itself, even in philosophy, are only attenuated versions of this animism, spontaneous, and often gracious even though fantastic, when men lacked instrumentalities by which to direct their active partakings in nature, but which are now graceless and obstructive.
In conclusion, the fact that consciousness of meanings, or having ideas, denotes an exigent re-making of meanings has an import for the theory of nature. Perceptibility is an exponent of contingency as it intersects the regular.
The impossibility of “deducing” consciousness from physi¬ cal laws, the “impassible gulf” between the physical and mental, are in reality but conspicuous cases of the general impossibility of deriving the contingent from the neces¬ sary, the uncertain from the regular. The anomaly apparent in the occurrence of consciousness is evidence of an anomalous phase in nature itself. Unless there were something problematic, undecided, still going-on and as yet unfinished and indeterminate, in nature, there could be no such events as perceptions. The point of maximum apparency is the point of greatest stress and undeter¬ mined potentiality; the point of maximum of restless shift, while also the point of greatest brightness; it is vivid, but not clear; imminent, urgently expressive of the impending, but not defined, till it has been disposed of and has ceased to be immediately focal. When philosophers have insisted upon the certainty of the immediately and focally present or “given” and have sought indubitable immediate existential data upon which to build, they have always unwittingly passed from the existential to the dialectical; they have substituted a general character for an immediate this. For the immediately given is always the dubious; it is always a matter for subsequent events to determine, or assign character to. It is a cry for some¬ thing not given, a request addressed to fortune, with the pathos of a plea or the imperiousness of a command. It were, conceivably, “better” that nature should be finished through and through, a closed mechanical or closed teleo¬ logical structure, such as philosophic schools have fancied.
But in that case the flickering candle of consciousness would go out.
The immediate perceptibility of meanings, the very existence of ideas, testifies to insertion of the problematic and hazardous in the settled and uniform, and to the meeting, crossing and parting of the substantial, static, and the transitive and particular. Meanings, characters as such have that solidity, coherence, endurance, and persistent availability, which our idiom calls substance. Yet were this the whole story, meanings not only would not be perceived, but they would not be meanings. They would be tough operative habits, having their own way not to be denied. Organic movements exist to which there occured in early life meanings so indurated that now they are habits of an over-riding power; meaning has disappeared in bare behavior. It is possible to under¬ stand the regret with which some persons contemplate the passage of thought into act; to them it seems the obsequies of an idea; thought has been dissipated in an outward mechanical sequence. Similarly, one may feel that the important and interesting thing in human history is not what men have done, their successes, but what they failed in doing — the desires and imaginings, forbidden execution by the force of events. Ideas are largely the obverse side of action; a perception of what might be, but is not, the promise of things hoped for, the symbol of things not seen. A fixed idea is no idea at all, but a routine compulsion of overt action, perfunctorily and mechanically named idea.
“Pure reason” would thus not be rational at all, but an automatic habit; a substance so stable and pervading as to have no limits and vicissitudes, and hence no percep¬ tibility. “Pure” reasoning is best carried on by fixed symbols, automatically manipulated; its ideal is sometiling approaching the well-devised mechanically operat¬ ive calculating machine. Unless nature had regular habits, persistent ways, so compacted that they time, measure and give rhythm and recurrence to transitive flux, meanings, recognizable characters, could not be. But also without an interplay of these patient, slowmoving, not easily stirred systems of action with swiftmoving, unstable, unsubstantial events, nature would be a routine unmarked by ideas. Adjustment of the slow moving changes of nature to its sudden starts and trep¬ idations, such as gives some degree of order to the latter and as re-adapts the motions of the sluggish and inert core to the volatile surface of hasty movements, makes necessary a conversion of static orders into stable mean¬ ings, while it also renders them perceptible, or ideas, as they answer to the flux of things.
Finally, as psycho-physical qualities testify to the pres¬ ence in nature of needs and satisfactions, of uneasy efforts and their arrest in some limiting termination, so conscious or conspicuously apparent meanings, ideas, are exponents of the deliberate use of the efficacious in behalf of the fulfilling and consummatory, and of the efficient or instru¬ mental nature of the final. This situation is empirically present to us in the arts, and will be discussed in the imme¬ diate sequel. For our immediate purpose, it is enough to point out the difference between the explicit natural teleology of classic metaphysics and the implicit tele¬ ology of modern science. In the former, the bare de facto arrests of nature, which often mark merely exhaustion or else limits imposed by competing energies, were by a tour de force assigned eulogistic properties. They were identified with the objects that should be the objects of choice by persons of mature and reflective experience. Thus physics was unwittingly infected by importation of an uncriticized ethic of customary and fixed ends, and of a dialectically ordered hierarchy of fixed means. The identification in modern thought of ends with ends-inview, with deliberate purpose and planning, of means with deliberately selected and arranged inventions and artifices, is in effect a recognition that the teleology of nature is achieved and exhibited bv nature in thinking, not apart from it. If modem theories have often failed to note this implication and have instead contented them¬ selves with a denial of all teleology, the reason is adven¬ titious; it is found in the gratuitous breach of continuity between nature, life, and man.
“This,” whatever this may be, always implies a system of meanings focussed at a point of stress, uncertainty, and need of regulation. It sums up history, and at the same time opens a new page; it is record and promise in one; a fulfillment and an opportunity. It is a fruition of what has happened and a transitive agency of what is to happen. It is a comment written by natural events on their own direction and tendency, and a surmise of whither they are leading. Every perception, or awareness, marks a “this,” and every “this” being a consummation in¬ volves retention, and hence contains the capacity of remembering. Every “'this” is transitive, momentarily becoming a “that.” In its movement it is, therefore, conditioning of what is to come; it presents the potential¬ ity of foresight and prediction. The union of past and future with the present manifest in every awareness of meanings is a mystery only when consciousness is gratu¬ itously divided from nature, and when nature is denied temporal and historic quality. When consciousness is connected with nature, the mystery becomes a luminous revelation of the operative interpenetration in nature of the efficient and the fulfilling.
CHAPTER NINE Experience, with the Greeks, signified a store of practi¬ cal wisdom, a fund of insights useful in conducting the affairs of fife. Sensation and perception were its occa¬ sion and supplied it with pertinent materials, but did not of themselves constitute it. They generated experience when retention was added and when a common factor in the multitude of felt and perceived cases detached itself so as to become available in judgment and exertion. Thus understood, experience is exemplified in the discrimina¬ tion and skill of the good carpenter, pilot, physician, captain-at-arms; experience is equivalent to art. Modern theory has quite properly extended the application of the term to cover many things that the Greeks would hardly have called “experience,” the bare having of aches and pains, or a play of colors before the eyes. But even those who hold tins larger signification would admit, I suppose, that such “experiences” count only when they result in insight, or in an enjoyed perception, and that only thus do they define experience in its honorific sense.
Greek thinkers nevertheless disparaged experience in comparison with something called reason and science. The ground for depreciation was not that usually assigned in modern philosophy; it was not that experience is “subjective.” On the contrary, experience was con¬ sidered to be a genuine expression of cosmic forces, not an exclusive attribute or possession of animal or of human nature. It was taken to be a realization of inferior portions of nature, those infected with chance and change, the less Being part of the cosmos. Thus while experience meant art, art reflected the contingencies and partialities of nature, while science — theory — exhibited its necessities and universalities. Art was born of need, lack, depriva¬ tion, incompleteness, while science — theory — manifested fullness and totality of Being. Thus the depreciatory view of experience was identical with a conception that placed practical activity below theoretical activity, find¬ ing the former dependent, impelled from outside, marked by deficiency of real being, while the latter was independ¬ ent and free because complete and self-sufficing: that is perfect.
In contrast with this self-consistent position we find a curious mixture in modern thinking. The latter feels under no obligation to present a theory of natural exist¬ ence that links art with nature; on the contrary, it usually holds that science or knowledge is the only authentic expression of nature, in which case art must be an arbi¬ trary addition to nature. But modern thought also com¬ bines exaltation of science with eulogistic appreciation of art, especially of fine or creative art. At the same time it retains the substance of the classic disparagement of the practical in contrast with the theoretical, although formulating it in somewhat different language: to the effect that knowledge deals with objective reality as it is in itself, while in what is “practical,” ' objective reality is altered and cognitively distorted by subjective factors of want, emotion and striving. And yet in its encomium of art, it fails to note the commonplace of Greek observa¬ tion — that the fine arts as well as the industrial technolo¬ gies are affairs of practice.
This confused plight is partly cause and partly effect of an almost universal confusion of the artistic and the esthetic. On one hand, there is action that deals with materials and energies outside the body, assembling, refining, combining, manipulating them until their new state yields a satisfaction not afforded by their crude condition — a formula that applies to fine and useful art alike. On the other hand, there is the delight that attends vision and hearing, an enhancement of the receptive ap¬ preciation and assimilation of objects irrespective of participation in the operations of production. Provided the difference of the two things is recognized, it is no matter whether the words “esthetic” and “artistic” or other terms be used to designate the distinction, for the difference is not one of words but of objects. But in some form the difference must be acknowledged.
The community in which Greek art was produced was small; numerous and complicated intermediaries be¬ tween production and consumption were iacking; pro¬ ducers had a virtually servile status. Because of the close connection between production and enjoyable fruition, the Greeks in their perceptive uses and enjoyments were never wholly unconscious of the artisan and his work, not even when they personally were exclusively concerned with delightful contemplation. But since the artist was an artisan (the term artist having none of the eulogistic connotations of present usage), and since the artisan occupied an inferior position, the enjoyment of works of any art did not stand upon the same level as enjoyment of those objects for the realization of which manual activ¬ ity was not needed. Objects of rational thought, of contemplative insight were the only things that met the specification of freedom from need, labor, and matter. They alone were self-sufficient, self-existent, and selfexplanatory, and hence enjoyment of them was on a higher plane than enjoyment of works of art.
These conceptions were consistent with one another and with the conditions of social life at the time. Nowa¬ days we have a messy conjunction of notions that are consistent neither with one another nor with the tenor of our actual life. Knowledge is still regarded by most thinkers as direct grasp of ultimate reality, although the practice of knowing has been assimilated to the procedure of the useful arts; — involving, that is to say, doing that manipulates and arranges natural energies. Again while science is said to lay hold of reality, yet “art” instead of being assigned a lower rank is equally esteemed and honored. And when within art a distinction is drawn between production and appreciation, the chief honor usually goes to the former on the ground that it is “crea¬ tive,” while taste is relatively possessive and passive, dependent for its material upon the activities of the creative artist.
If Greek philosophy was correct in thinking of knowl¬ edge as contemplation rather than as a productive art, and if modern philosophy accepts this conclusion, then the only logical course is relative disparagement of all forms of production, since they are modes of practice which is by conception inferior to contemplation. The artistic is then secondary to the esthetic: “creation,” to “taste,” and the scientific worker — as we significantly say — is subordinate in rank and worth to the dilettante who enjoys the results of his labors. But if modern tendencies are justified in putting art and creation first, then the implications of this position should be avowed and carried through. It would then be seen that science is an art, that art is practice, and that the only distinc¬ tion worth drawing is not between practice and theory, but between those modes of practice that are not intelli¬ gent, not inherently and immediately enjoyable, and those which are full of enjoyed meanings. When this percep¬ tion dawns, it will be a commonplace that art — the mode of activity that is charged with meanings capable of immediately enjoyed possession — is the complete cul¬ mination of nature, and that “science” is properly a handmaiden that conducts natural events to this happy issue. Thus would disappear the separations that trouble present thinking: division of everything into nature and experience, of experience into practice and theory, art and science, of art into useful and fine, menial and free.
Thus the issue involved in experience as art in its preg¬ nant sense and in art as processes and materials of nature continued by direction into achieved and enjoyed mean¬ ings, sums up in itself all the issues which have been previ¬ ously considered. Thought, intelligence, science is the in¬ tentional direction of natural events to meanings capable of immediate possession and enjoyment; this direction — which is operative art— -is itself a natural event in which nature otherwise partial and incomplete comes fully to itself; so that objects of conscious experience when reflec¬ tively chosen, form the “end” of nature. The doings and sufferings that form experience are, in the degree in which experience is intelligent or charged with meanings, a union of the precarious, novel, irregular with the settled, assured and uniform — a union which also defines the artistic and the esthetic. For wherever there is art the contingent and ongoing no longer work at cross purposes with the formal and recurrent but commingle in harmony. And the distinguishing feature of conscious experience, of what for short is often called “consciousness,” is that in it the instrumental and the final, meanings that are signs and clews and meanings that are immediately possessed, suffered and enjoyed, come together in one. And all of these things are preeminently true of art.
First, then, art is solvent union of the generic, recurrent, ordered, established phase of nature with its phase that is incomplete, going on, and hence still uncertain, contin¬ gent, novel, particular; or as certain systems of esthetic theory have truly declared, though without empirical basis and import in their words, a union of necessity and freedom, a harmony of the many and one, a reconciliation of sensuous and ideal. Of any artistic act and product it may be said both that it is inevitable in its rightness, that nothing in it can be altered without altering all, and that its occurrence is spontaneous, unexpected, fresh, unpredictable. The presence in art, whether as an act or a product, of proportion, economy, order, symmetry, composition, is such a commonplace that it does not need to be dwelt upon. But equally necessary is unex¬ pected combination, and the consequent revelation of possibilities hitherto unrealized. “Repose in stimulation” characterizes art. Order and proportion when they are the whole story are soon exhausted; economy in itself is a tiresome and restrictive taskmaster. It is artistic when it releases.
The more extensive and repeated are the basic uniformi¬ ties of nature that give form to art, the “greater” is the art, provided — and it is this proviso that distinguishes art — they are indistinguishably fused with the wonder of the new and the grace of the gratuitous. “Creation” may be asserted vaguely and mystically; but it denotes something genuine and indispensable in art. The merely finished is not fine but ended, done with, and the merely “fresh” is that bumptious impertinence indicated by the slang use of the word. The “magic” of poetry — and pregnant experience has poetical quality — is precisely the revelation of meaning in the old effected by its pre¬ sentation through the new. It radiates the light that never was on land and sea but that is henceforth an abiding illumination of objects. Music in its immediate occurrence is the most varied and etherial of the arts, but is in its conditions and structure the most mechanical. These things are commonplaces; but until they are com¬ monly employed in their evidential significance for a theory of nature’s nature, there is no cause to apologize for their citation.
The limiting terms that define art are routine at one extreme and capricious impulse at the other. It is hardly worth while to oppose science and art sharply to one another, when the deficiencies and troubles of life are so evidently due to separation between art and blind routine and blind impulse. Routine exemplies the uni¬ formities and recurrences of nature, caprice expresses its inchoate initiations and deviations. Each in isolation is unnatural as well as inartistic, for nature is an inter¬ section of spontaneity and necessity, the regular and the novel, the finished and the beginning. It is right to object to much of current practice on the ground that it is routine, just as it is right to object to much of our current enjoyments on the ground that they are spasms of excited escape from the thraldom of enforced work. But to transform a just objection against the quality of much of our practical life into a description and definition of practice is on the same plane as to convert legitimate objection to trivial distraction, senseless amusement, and sensual absorption, into a Puritanical aversion to happiness. The idea that work, productive activity, signifies action carried on for merely extraneous ends, and the idea that happiness signifies surrender of mind to the thrills and excitations of the body are one and the same idea. The first notion marks the separation of activity from meaning, and the second marks the separation of receptivity from meaning. Both separations are inevi¬ table as far as experience fails to be art: — when the regu¬ lar, repetitious, and the novel, contingent in nature fail to sustain and inform each other in a productive activity possessed of immanent and directly enjoyed meaning.
Thus the theme has insensibly passed over into that of the relation of means and consequence, process and product, the instrumental and consummatory. Any activity that is simultaneously both, rather than in alternation and displacement, is art. Disunion of pro¬ duction and consumption is a common enough occurrence. But emphasis upon this separation in order to exalt the consummatory does not define or interpret either art or experience. It obscures their meaning, resulting in a division of art into useful and fine, adjectives which, when they are prefixed to “art,” corrupt and destroy its intrin¬ sic significance. For arts that are merely useful are not arts but routines; and arts that are merely final are not arts but passive amusements and distractions, different from other indulgent dissipations only in dependence upon a certain acquired refinement or “cultivation.”
The existence of activities that have no immediate enjoyed intrinsic meaning is undeniable. They in¬ clude much of our labors in home, factory, laboratory and study. By no stretch of language can they be termed either artistic or esthetic. Yet they exist, and are so coercive that they require some attentive recognition. So we optimistically call them “useful” and let it go at that, thinking that by calling them useful we have some¬ how justified and explained their occurrence. If we were to ask useful for what? we should be obliged to examine their actual consequences, and when we once honestly and fully faced these consequences we should probably find ground for calling such activities detrimental rather than useful.
We call them useful because we arbitrarily cut short our consideration of consequences. We bring into view simply their efficacy in bringing into existence certain commodities; we do not ask for their effect upon the quality of human life and experience. They are useful to make shoes, houses, motor cars, money, and other things which may then be put to use; here inquiry and imagination stop. What they also make by way of narrowed, embittered, and crippled life, of congested, hurried, confused and extrava¬ gant life, is left in oblivion. But to bejiselulis to fulfill need. The characteristic human need is for possession and appreciation of the meaning of things, and this need is ignored and unsatisfied in the traditional notion of the useful. We identify utility with the external rela¬ tionship that some events and acts bear to other things that are their products, and thus leave out the only thing that is essential to the idea of utility, inherent place and bearing in experience. Our classificatory use of the conception of some arts as merely instrumental so as to dispose of a large part of human activity is no solving de¬ finition; it rather conveys an immense and urgent problem.