The^ “matter’ ’ of materialists and the “spirit” of idealists is a creature similar to the constitution of the United States in the minds of unimaginative persons.
Obviously the real constitution is certain basic relation¬ ships among the activities of the citizens of the country; it is a property or phase of these processes, so connected with them as to influence their rate and direction of change. But by literalists it is often conceived of as something external to them; in itself fixed, a rigid framework to which all changes must accommodate themselves. Similarly what we call matter is that character of natural events which is so tied up with changes that are sufficiently rapid to be perceptible as to give the latter a characteristic rhythmic order, the causal sequence. It is no cause or source of events or processes; no absolute monarch; no principle of explanation; no substance behind or under¬ lying changes — save in that sense of substance in which a man well fortified with this world’s goods, and hence able to maintain himself through vicissitudes of surround¬ ings, is a man of substance. The name designates a character in operation, not an entity.
That structure, whether of the kind called material or of the kind summed up in the word mental, is stable or permanent relationally and in its office, may be shown in another way. There is no action without reaction; there is no exclusively one-way exercise of conditioning power, no mode of regulation that operates wholly from above to below or from within outwards or from without inwards. Whatever influences the changes of other things is itself changed. The idea of an activity proceeding only in one direction, of an unmoved mover, is a survival of Greek physics. It has been banished from science, but remains to haunt philosophy. The vague and mysterious properties assigned to mind and matter, the veiy con¬ ceptions of mind and matter in traditional thought, are ghosts walking underground. The notion of matter ac¬ tually found in the practice of science has nothing in com¬ mon with the matter of materialists — and almost every¬ body is still a materialist as to matter, to which he merely adds a second rigid structure which he calls mind. The matter of science is a character of natural events and changes as they change; their character of regular and stable order.
Natural events are so complex and varied that there is nothing surprising in their possession of different characterizations, characters so different that they can be easily treated as opposites.
I Nothing but unfamiliarity stands in the way of thinking of both mind and matter as different characters of natural events, in which matter expresses their sequential order, and mind the order of their meanings in their logical connections and dependencies. Processes may be event¬ ful for functions which taken in abstract separation are at opposite poles, just as physiological processes eventuate in both anabolic and katabolic functions. The idea that matter and mind are two sides or “aspects” of the same things, like the convex and the concave in a curve. is_ literally unthinkable. J A curve is an intelligible object and concave and convex are defined in terms of this object; they are indeed but names for properties involved in its meaning. We do not start with convexity and concavity as two independent things and then set up an unknown tertium quid to unite two disparate things. In spite of the literal absurdity of the comparison, it may be understood however in a way which conveys an inkling of the truth. That to which both mind and matter belong is the complex of events that constitute nature. This becomes a mysterious tertiwn quid, incapable of designation, only when mind and matter are taken to be static structures instead of functional characters. It is a plausible prediction that if there were an interdict placed for a generation upon the use of mind, matter, consciousness as nouns, and we were obliged to employ adjectives and adverbs, conscious and consciously, mental and mentally, material and physically, we should find many of our problems much J simplified.
We have selected only a few of the variety of the illustrations that might be used in support of the idea that the significant problems and issues of life and philosophy concern the rate and mode of the conjunction of the pre¬ carious and theassured, the incomplete and the finished, the repe titious and the varying, the safe and sane and the haz¬ ardous. If we trust to the evidence of experienced things, these traits, and the modes and tempos of their inter¬ action with each other, are fundamental features of natural existence. The experience of their various conse¬ quences, according as they are relatively isolated, unhap¬ pily or happily combined, is evidence that wisdom, and hence that love of wisdom which is philosophy, is concerned with choice and administration of their proportioned union. Structure and process, substance and accident, matter and energy, permanence and flux, one and many, continuity and discreteness, order and progress, law and liberty, uniformity and growth, tradition and innovation, rational will and impelling desires, proof and discovery, the actual and the possible, are names given to various phases of their conjunction, and the issue of living de¬ pends upon the art with which these things are adjusted to each other.
While metaphysics may stop short with noting and registering these traits, man is not contemplatively de¬ tached from them. They involve him in his perplexities and troubles, and are the source of his joys and achieve¬ ments. The situation is not indifferent to man, because it forms man as a desiring, striving, thinking, feeling creature. It is not egotism that leads man from contem¬ plative registration of these traits to interest in managing them, to intelligence and purposive art. Interest, think¬ ing, planning, striving, consummation and frustration are a drama enacted by these forces and conditions. A particular choice may be arbitrary; this is only to say that it does not approve itself to reflection. But choice is not arbitrary, not in a universe like this one, a world which is not finished and which has not consistently made up its mind where i t is going and what it is going to do. Or, if we call it arbitrary, the arbitrariness is not ours but that of existence itself. And to call existence arbitrary or by any moral name, whether disparaging or honorific, is to patronize nature. To assume an attitude of con¬ descension toward existence is perhaps a natural human compensation for the straits of life. But it is an ulti¬ mate source of the covert, uncandid and cheap in philos¬ ophy. This compensatory disposition it is which forgets that reflection exists to guide choice and effort. Hence its love of wisdom is but an unlaborious transformation of existence by dialectic, instead of an opening and en¬ larging of the ways of nature in man. A true wisdom.
devoted to the latter task, discovers in thoughtful observation and experiment the method of administering the unfinished processes of existence so that frail goods shall be substantiated, secure goods be extended, and the precarious promises of good that haunt experienced things be more liberally fulfilled.
CHAPTER THREE Human experience in the large, jn its coarse and conspicuous features, has for one of its most striking features preoccupation with direct enjoyment, feasting and festivi¬ ties; ornamentation, dance, song, dramatic pantomine. telling yarns and enacting stories. In comparison with intellectual and moral endeavor, this trait of experience has hardly received the attention from philosophers that it demands. Even philosophers who have conceived that pleasure is the sole motive of man and the attainment of happiness his whole aim, have given a curiously sober, drab, account of the working of pleasure and the search for happiness. Consider the utilitarians how they toiled, spun and wove, but who never saw man arrayed in joy as the lilies of the field. Happiness was to them a matter of calculation and effort, of industry guided by mathematical book-keeping. The history of man shows however that man takes his enjoyment neat, and at as short range as possible.
Direct appropriations and satisfactions were prior to anything but the most elementary and exigent prudence, just as the useful arts preceeded the sciences. The body is decked before it is clothed. While homes are still hovels, temples and palaces are embellished. Luxuries prevail over necessities except when necessities can be festally celebrated. Men make a game of their fishing and hunting, and turn to the periodic and disciplinary labor of agriculture only when inferiors, women and slaves, cannot be had to do the work. Useful labor is, whenever possible, transformed bv ceremonial and ritual accompani¬ ments. subordinated to art that yields immediate enjoy -mentj otherwise it is attended to under the compulsion of circumstance during abbreviated surrenders of leisure. For leisure permits of festivity, in revery, ceremonies and conversation. The pressure of necessity is, however, never wholly lost, and the sense of it led men, as if with utieasy conscience at their respite from work, to impute practical efficacy to play and rites, endowing them with power to coerce events and to purchase the favor of rulers of events.
But it is possible to magnify the place of magical_exercise and superstitious legend. The primary interest lies in staging the show and enjoying the spectacle, in giving plav to the ineradicable interest in stories which illustrate the contingencies of existence combined with happier endings for emergencies than surrounding conditions often permit. It was not conscience that kept men loyal to cults and rites, and faithful to tribal myths. So far as it was not routine, it was enjoyment of the drama of life without the latter’s liabilities that kept melvifrom decay. Interest in rites as means of influencing the course _of things, and the cognitive or explanation office of myths were hardly more than an embroidery, repeating in pleasant form the pattern which inexpugnable necessities imposed upon practice. When rite and myth are sponta¬ neous rehearsal of the impact and career of practical needs and doings, they must also seem to have practical force. The political significance of July Fourth, 1776, is ence Day, but this effect hardly accounts for the fervor of the celebration. Any excuse serves for a holiday and the more the holiday is decked out with things that contrast with the pressure of workaday life while re-enacting its form, the more a holiday it_is. The more unrestrained the play of fancy the greater the contrast. The super¬ natural has more thrills than the natural, the customary; holidays and holy-days are indistinguishable. Death is an occasion for a wake, and mourning is acclaimed with board of funeral meats.
Reflected upon, this phase of experience manifests objects which are final. The attitude involved in their appreciation is esthetic. The operations entering into their production is fine art, distinguished from useful art. It is dangerous however to give names, especially in discourse that is far aloof from the things named — direct enjoyment of the interplay of the contingent and the effec¬ tive, purged of practical risks and penalties. Esthetic, fine art, appreciation, drama have an eulogistic flavor. We hesitate to call the penny-dreadful of fiction artistic, so we call it debased fiction or a travesty on art. Most sources of direct enjoyment for the masses are not art to the cultivated, but perverted art, an unworthy indulgence. Thu(s we miss the point. A passion of anger, a dreamy relaxation of the limbs after effort, swapping of jokes, horse-play, beating of drums, blowing of tin whistles, explosion of firecrackers and walking on stilts, have the same quality of immediate and absorbing finality that is possessed by things and acts dignified by the title of esthejjc. For man is more preoccupied with enhancing life than with bare living; so that a sense of living when it attends labor and utility is borrowed not intrinsic, having been generated in those periods of relief when activity was dramatic.
To say these things is only to say that man is naturally more interested in-Consumm ationg_ than he is in prepara¬ tions; and that consummations have first to be hit upon spontaneously and accidentally — as the baby gets food and all of us are warmed by the sun — before they can be objects of foresight, invention and industry. Conscious¬ ness so far as it is not dull ache and torpid comfort is a thing of the imagination. The extensions and trans¬ formations of existence generated in imagination may come at last to attend work so as to make it significant and agreeable. But when men are first at the height of busi¬ ness, they are too busy to engage either in fancy or reflective inquiry. At the outset the hunt was enjoyed in the feast, or in the calm moments of shaping spears, bows and arrows. Only later was the content of these experiences carried over into hunting itself, so that even its dangers might be savored. Labor, through its structure and order, lends play its pattern and plot; play then returns the loan with interest to work, in giving it a sense of beginning, sequence and climax. As long as imagined objects are satisfying, the logic of drama, of suspense, thrill and success, domi¬ nates the logic of objective events. Cosmogonies are mythological not because savages indulge in defective scientific explanations, but because objects of imagination are consummatory in the degree in which they exuber¬ antly escape from the pressure of natural surroundings, even when they re-enact its crises. The congenial is first form of the consistent.
As Goldenweiser says, if supernaturalism prevails in early culture it is largely because, “the phantasmagoria of supernaturalism is esthetically attractive, it has beauty of thought and form and of movement, it abounds in delightful samples of logical coherence, and is full of fascination for the creator, the systematizer and the beholder.” And it is safe to add, that the esthetic character of logical coherence rather than its tested coherence with fact is th at which yields the delight. Again speaking of the place of ceremonialism in early culture, Goldenweiser well char¬ acterizes it as a kind of “psychic incandescence;” because of its presence, there is “no cooling of the ever glowing mass (the conglomerate of customs) no flagging of the emotions, no sinking of the cultural associations to the more precarious level of purely ideational connections.”
Modern psychiatry as well as anthropology have dem¬ onstrated the enormous role of symbolism in hurjran experience. The word symbolism, however, is a product of reflection upon direct phenomena, not a description of what happens when so-called symbols are potent. For the feature which characterizes symbolism is precisely that the thing which later reflection calls a symbol is not a symbol, but a direct vehicle, a concrete embodiment, a vital incarnation. To find its counterpart we should betake ourselves not to signal flags which convey informa¬ tion, ideas and direction, but to a national flag in moments of intense emotional stir of a devout patriot. Symbolism in this sense dominates not only all early art and cult but social organization as well. Rites, designs, patterns are all charged with a significance which we may call mystic, -^but which is immediate and direct to those who have and celebrate them. Be the origin of the totem what it may, it is not a cold, intellectual sign of a social organiza¬ tion; it is that organization made present and visible, a centre of emotionally charged behavior. It is not other¬ wise with the symbolism uncovered in dreams and neurotic states by psychological analysis. Such symbols are not indicative or intellectual signs; they are condensed substitutes of actual things and events, which embody actual things with more direct and enhanced import than do the things themselves with their distractions, imposi¬ tions, and irrelevances. Meanings are intellectually dis¬ torted and depressed, but immediately they are height¬ ened and concentrated.
Jesperson speaks of the origin of language in similar terms. He says that many linguistic philosophers appear to “imagine our primitive ancestors after their own image as serious and well meaning men, endowed with a large share of common sense. They leave you with the impression that these first framers of speech were sedate citizens with a strong interest in the purely business and matter of fact aspects of life.” But Jesper¬ son finds that the prosaic side of early culture was capable only “of calling forth short monosyllabic interjections; they are the most immutable portions of language, and remain now at essentially the same standpoint as thous¬ ands of years ago.” He concludes that the “genesis of language is found...in the poetic side of life; the source of speech is not gloomy seriousness, but merry play and youthful hilarity.” And no one would deny, I suppose that literature rather than business and science has developed and fixed our present linguistic resources.
It would be difficult to find a fact more significant of the traits of nature, more instructive for a naturalistic meta¬ physics of existence, than this cleavage of the things of human experience into actual but hard objects, and enjoyed but imagined objects. One might think that philosophers in their search for some datum that possesses properties that put it beyond doubt, might have directed their attention to this direct phase of experience, in which objects are not a matter of sensations, ideas, beliefs or knowledge, but are something had and enjoyed. All that “self-evidence” can intelligibly mean is obviousness of presence; commonplaces like human interest in the things of sport and celebration are the most conspicuously obvious of all. In comparison, the “self-evident” things of philosophers are recondite and technical.
The other roost self-evident thing in experience is use¬ ful labor and its coercive necessity. As direct apprecia¬ tive enjoyment exhibits things in their consummatory phase, labor manifests things in their connections of things with one another, in efficiency, productivity, fur¬ thering, hindering, generating, destroying. From _ the standpoint of enjoyment a thing is what it directly does forjas. From that of labor a thing is what it will do to other things — the only way in which a tool or an obstacle can be defined. Extraordinary and subtle reasons havg been assigned for belief in the principle of causation. Labor and the use of tools seem, however, to be a sufficient empirical reason: indeed, to be the only empirical events that can be specifically pointed to in this connection. They are more adequate grounds for acceptance of belief in causality than are the regular sequences of nature or than a category of reason, or the alleged fact of will. The first thinker who proclaimed that eve.ry_i something and cause of ular existence is both conditioned and condition, merely put into words the procedure of the workman, converting a mode of practice into a formula. External regularity is familiar, customary, taken for granted, not thought of, embodied in thoughtless routine. Regularity, orderly sequence, in productive labor presents itself to thought as a controlling principle. Industrial arts are the typeforms of experience that bring to light the sequential connections of things with one another.
In contrast, the enjoyment (with which suffering is to be classed) of things is a declaration that natural exist¬ ences are not mere passage ways to another passage way, and so on ad infinitum. Thinkers interested in esthetic experience are wont to point out the absurdity of the idea that things are good or valuable only for something else; they dwell on the fact vouchsafed by esthetic appreciation that there are things that have their goodness or value in themselves, which are not cherished for the sake of any¬ thing else. These philosophers usually confine this obser¬ vation however to human affairs isolated from nature, which they interpret exclusively in terms of labor, or causal connections. But in every event there is some¬ thing obdurate, self-sufficient, wholly immediate, neither a relation nor an element in a relational whole, but termi¬ nal and exclusive. Here, as in so many other matters, materialists and idealists agree in an underlying meta¬ physics which ignores in behalf of relations and relational systems, those irreducible, infinitely plural, undefinable and indescribable qualities which a thing must have in order to be, and in order to be capable of becoming the subject of relations and a theme of discourse. Immediacy of existence is ineffable. But there is nothing mystical about such ineffability; it expresses the fact that of direct existence it is futile to say anything to one’s self and impossible to say anything to another. Discourse can but intimate connections which if followed out may lead one to have an existence. Things in their immediacy are unknown and unknowable, not because they are remote or behind some impenetrable veil of sensation of ideas, ^ but because knowledge has no concern with them. For knowledge is a memorandum of conditions of their appear¬ ance, concerned, that is, with sequences, coexistences, relations. Immediate things may be pointed ta bv words, but not described or defined. Description when it occurs is but a part of a circuitous method of pointing or denot¬ ing; index to a starting point and road which if taken may lead to a direct and ineffable presence. To the em¬ pirical thinker, immediate enjoyment and suffering are the conclusive exhibition and evidence that nature has its finalities as well as its relationships.
Many modern thinkers, influenced by the notion that knowledge is the only mode of experience that grasps things, assuming the ubiquity of cognition, and noting that immediacy or qualitative existence has no place in authentic science, have asserted that qualities are always and only states of consciousness. It is a reasonable belief that there would be no such thing as “consciousness” if events did not have a phase of brute and unconditioned “isness,” of being just what they irreducibly are. Con¬ sciousness as sensation, image and emotion is thus a par¬ ticular case of immediacy occurring under complicated conditions. And also without immediate qualities those relations with which science deals, would have no footing in existence and thought would have nothing beyond itself to chew upon or dig into. Without a basis in qualitative events, the characteristic subject-matter of knowledge would be algebraic ghosts, relations that do not relate. To dispose of things in which relations terminate by calling them elements, is to discourse within a relational and logical scheme. Only if elements are more than just elements in a whole, only if they have something qualita¬ tively their own, can a relational system be prevented from complete collapse.
The Greeks were more naive than we are. Their thinkers were as much dominated by the esthetic charac¬ ters of experienced objects as modern thinkers are by their scientific and economic (or relational) traits. Con¬ sequently they had no difficulty in recognizing the im¬ portance of qualities and of things inherently closed or final. They thought of mind as a realization of natural existence or a participation in it. Thus they were saved from the epistemological problem of how things and mind, defined antithetically, can have anything to do with each other. If existence in its immediacies could speak it would proclaim, “I may have relatives but I am not related.” In esthetic objects, that is in all immediately enjoyed and suffered things, in things directly possessed, they thus speak for themselves; Greek thinkers heard their voice.
Unfortunately however, these thinkers were not con¬ tent to speak as artists, of whom they had a low opinion. Since they were thinkers, aiming at truth or knowledge, they put art on a lower plane than science; and the only enjoyment they found worth serious attention was that of objects of thought. In consequence they formulated a doctrine in which the esthetic and the rational are con¬ fused on principle, and they bequeathed the confusion as an intellectual tradition to their successors. Aristotle, spoke more truly than he was aware when he said that philosophy began in leisure “when almost all the necessaries and things that make for comfort and recreation were present.’ ’ For it was philosophic, rather than scien¬ tific “knowledge” which thus began. Philosophy was a telling of the story of nature after the style of all congenial stories, a story with a plot and climax, given such coherent properties as would render it congenial to minds demanding that objects satisfy logical canons.
Objects are certainly none the worse for having wonder and admiration for their inspiration and art for their medium. But these objects are distorted when their affiliation with the epic, temple and drama is denied, and ^ there is claimed for them a rational and cosmic status independent of piety, drama and story. In the classic philosophy of Greece the picture of the world that was constructed on an artistic model proferred itself as being the result of intellectual study. A story composed in the interests of a refined type of enjoyment, ordered by the needs of consistency in discourse, or dialectic, became cosmology and metaphysics. Its authors took toward art and rite much the same sort of superior attitude that the modern esthete takes to vulgar forms of esthetic satisfaction. A claim for superiority in subject matter and mode of artistic treatment was indeed legitimate; but a claim was made for difference in kind. Art was an embellished imitation of the everyday or empirical affairs of life in their natural setting; philosophy was science, an envisagement of realities behind all copies, all phenomena; or a grasp of essences within them forming their valid substance. The delight attending the insight was attrib¬ uted to the final intrinsic dignity of the cosmic objects perceived by reason, instead of being frankly recognized to be due to a selection and arrangement of things.with a view to enhancement of tranquil enjoyment.
Devotion to rites, stories and revery springs on its magical side from practical desire to control the contin¬ gent; but in larger measure it embodies the happiness that attends the sense of successful issue from the uncertainly hazardous. Imagination is primarily dramatic, rather than lyric, whether it takes the form of the play enacted on the stage, of the told story or silent soliloquy. The constant presence of instability and trouble gives depth and poignancy to the situations in which are pictured their subordination to final issues possessed of calm and cer¬ tainty. To re-enact the vicissitudes, crises and tragedies of life under conditions that deprive them of their oyeit^ dangers, is the natural r61e of “consciousness,” which is tamed to respect actualities only when circumstance enforces the adoption of the method of labor, a discipline that is fortunate if it retain some of the liberation from immediate exigencies which characterizes dramatic imagination.
Modern critics of esthetics have criticized the concep-1^ tion of Plato and Aristotle that art is imitation. But in its original statement, this conception was a description of the observed facts of drama, music and epic rather than theoretical interpretation. For these thinkers were not so stupid as to hold that art is an imitation of inert things; they held that it was a mimesis of the critical and climatic behavior of natural forces within human career and des¬ tiny. Such a reproduction is naturally in a new and liberal medium; it permits idealization, but the idealiza¬ tion is of natural events. It is self-sufficing, an end in itself, while the events seem to exist only to render the perfection of an idealized reproduction possible and per¬ tinent. Resort to esthetic objects is the spontaneous human escape and consolation in a trying and difficult world. A world that consisted entirely of stable objects directly presented and possessed would have no esthetic qualities; it would just be, and would lack power to satisfy and to inspire. Objects are actually esthetic when they turn hazard and defeat to an issue which is above and beyond trouble and vicissitude. Festal celebration and congummatorv delights belong only in a world that knows risk and hardship.
Greek philosophy as well as Greek art is a memorial of the joy in what is finished, when it is found amid a world of unrest, struggle, and uncertainty in what, since it js ended, does not commit us to the uncertain hazards of. what js stillgoing on • Without such experiences as those of Greek art it is hardly conceivable that the craving for the passage of change into rest, of the contingent, mixed and wandering into the composed and total, would have found a model after which to design a universe like the cosmos of Platonic and Aristotelian tradition. Form was the first and last word of philosophy because it had been that of art; form is change arrested in a prerogative object. It conveys a sense of the imperishable and timeless, although the material in which it is exemplified is subject to decay and contingency. It thus conveys an intimation of potentialities completely actualized in a happier realm, where events are not events, but are arrested and brought to a close in an eternal self-sustain¬ ing activity. Such a realm is intrinsically one of secure and self-possessed meaning. It consists of objects of immediate enjoyment hypostasized into transcendent reality. Such was the conversion of Greek esthetic con¬ templation effected by Greek reflection.
The technical structure of the resulting metaphysics is familiar. The cosmically real is one with the finished, the perfect, or wholly done. Even with Aristotle, a coldly defining theory, called metaphysics, of the traits of Being, becomes a theology, or science of ultimate and eternal reality to which only ecstatic predicates are at¬ tributable. It consists of pure forms, self-sufficient, selfenclosed and self-sustaining; self-movement or life at eternal full- tide. Forms are ideal, and the ideal is the rational apprehended by reason. The material for this point of view was found empirically in what is consummatory and final; and the dominion exercised by art in Greek culture fostered and enhanced attention to objects of this immediately enjoyed kind. To the spectator, artistic objects are given; they need only to be envisaged; Greek reflection, carried on by a leisure class in the inter¬ est of liberalizing leisure, was preeminently that of the spectator, not that of the participator in processes of pro¬ duction. Labor, production, did not seem to create form, it dealt with matter or changing things so as to furnish an occasion for incarnation of antecedent forms in matter. To artisans form is alien, unperceived and unenjoyed; absorbed in laboring with material, they live in a world of change and matter, even when their labors have an end in manifestation of form. Plato was so troubled by the consequences of this ignorance of form on the part of all who live in the world of practice, industrial and political, that he elaborated a plan by which their activities might be regulated by those who, above labor and entanglement in change and practice, provide in laws forms to shape the habits of those who work. Aristotle escaped the dilemma by putting nature above art, and endowing nature with