The second character of objects of science follows from this feature. The possibility of regulating the occur¬ rence of any event depends upon the possibility of in¬ stituting substitutions. By means of the latter, a thing which is within grasp is used to stand for another thing which is not immediately had, or which is beyond control. The technique of equations and other functions charac¬ teristic of modern science is, taken generically, a method of thoroughgoing substitutions. It is a system of ex¬ change and mutual conversion carried to its limit.2 The 2 The modern mathematical conception of infinity as correspondence of part and whole appears to represent this function in its generalized form.
cognitive result is the homogeneous natural world of modern science, in its contrast with the qualitatively heterogeneous world of ancient science; the latter being made up of things different in inherent kinds and in qualities of movement, such up and down, lateral and circular, and heterogeneous according to periods of time, such as earlier and later. These become amenable to transformations in virtue of reciprocal substitutions.
In the third place, objects of knowledge as means ex¬ plain the importance attached to elements, or numerically discrete units. Control of beginnings and ends by means is possible only when the individual, the unique, is treated as a composite of parts, made by sequential differentiations and integrations.3 In its own integrity an immediate thing just exists as it exists; it stays or it passes; it is enjoyed or suffered. That is all that can be said. But when it is treated as the outcome of a complex convergence or co¬ incidence of a large number of elementary independent variables, points, moments, numerical units, particles of mass and energy or more elementary space-times, (which in spite of their independence are capable of one to one correspondence with one another) the situation changes. The simples or elements are in effect the last pivots upon which regulation of conditions, turns; last, that is to say, as far as present appliances permit.
3 Leibniz, whose monadism is the first philosophical manifestation of this notion, and the prototype of analytic realism, or theory of external relations, asserted the existence of monads on the ground that every composite implies elements. Surely. But he omitted to note that metaphysically the case was begged as soon as an affair, no matter how elaborate in structure, is regarded as being composite. To be a com¬ posite is one thing; to be capable of reduction to a composite by certain measures, is another thing.
Preoccupation with elementary units is as marked in logic, biology, and psychology, as in physics and chemis¬ try. Sometimes it seems to have resulted in taking merely dialectical entities for actual unitary elements; but that is not logically necessary. Such an outcome signifies only that the right units were not found. Serious objection holds when the instrumental character of the elements is forgotten; and they are treated as independent, ultimate; when they are treated as metaphysical finalities, insoluble epistemological problems result. Whatever are designated as elements, whether logical, mathematical, physical or mental, depend especially upon the existence of immediate, qualitatively integral objects. Search for elements starts with such empirical objects already pos¬ sessed. Sensory data, whether they are designated psychic or physical, are thus not starting points; they are the products of analysis. Denial of the primary reality of immediate empirical objects logically terminates in an abrogation of the reality of elements; for sensory data, or sensa and sensibilia, are the residua of analysis of these primary things. Moreover every step of analysis depends upon continual reference to these empirical objects. Drop them from mental view for a moment and any clew in search for elements is lost. Unless macro¬ scopic things are recognized, cells, electrons, logical ele¬ ments become meaningless. The latter have meaning only as elements of. Since, for example, only propositions have implications, a proposition cannot be a mere conjunc¬ tion of terms; terms having no implications, a proposi¬ tion so formed would have no significance. Terms must have a significance and since that they have only in a proposition, they depend upon some prior unity. In similar fashion, a purely unitary physical element would have no efficacy; it could not act or be acted upon.
We quote from a psychiatric writer speaking of his own field, in dealing with a particular matter on its own merits. With reference to one stage in the development of the theory of mental disorders, Dr. Adolph Meyer said that “there was a quest for elements of mind and their immediate correlation with the latest discoveries in the structure of the brain. The centre theory and the cell and neuronic theory seemed obligatory standpoints. Today we have become shy of such a one-sided not suffi¬ ciently functional materialism. There is always a place for elements, but there is certainly also a place for the large momentous facts of human life just as we find it. The psychopathologist had to learn to do more than the so-called “elementalist,” who always goes back to the elements and smallest units and then is apt to shirk the responsibility of making an attempt to solve the concrete problems of greater complexity. The psychiatrist has to study individuals and groups as wholes, as complex units, as the “you” or “he” or “she” or “they” we have to work with. We recognize that throughout nature we have to face the general principle of unit-formation, and the fact that new units need not be a mere sum of the component parts, but can be an actually new entity not wholly predictable from the component parts and known only through actual ex¬ perience with the specific product.”4 Lastly, the instrumental nature of objects of knowl¬ edge accounts for the central position of laws, relations.
These are the formulations of the regularities upon which intellectual and other regulation of things as immediate apparitions depends. Variability of elements in mathe¬ matical science is specious; elements vary independently of one another, but not independently of a relation to others, the relation or law being the constancy among variations. It is a truism that mathematics is the method by which elements can be stated as terms in con¬ stant relations, and be subjected to equations and other functions of transformation and substitution. An ele¬ ment is appropriately represented by a mathematical variable; for since any variable falls within some equa¬ tion, it is treated as a constant function of other varibles. The shift from variability to constancy is repeated as often as is needed. It is thus only pro forma that the variable is variable. It is not variable in the sense in which unique individualized existences are variable.
The inevitable consequence is the subjection of indivi¬ duals or unique modes of variation to external relations, to laws of uniformity; that is to say, the elimination of individuality. Bear in mind the instrumental nature of the relation of elements, and this abrogation of indivi¬ duality merely means a temporary neglect — an abstracted gaze — in behalf of attending to conditions under which individualities present themselves. Convert the ob¬ jects of knowledge into real things by themselves, and individuals become anomalous or unreal; they are not individualized for science but are instances, cases, speci¬ mens, of some generical relation or law.
The difficulty under which morals labor in this case is evident. They can be “saved” only by the supposition of another kind of Being from that with which natural sciences are concerned. History and anthropology are implicated in a similar predicament. The former has for subject-matter not only individual persons but un¬ duplicated situations and events. The attempt to es¬ cape the dilemma by recourse to uniform and unilinear laws of sequence or “evolution” is inept; it contradicts the premises assumed, and is not borne out by facts. Contemporary anthropologists have made clear the historical nature of the phenomena with which they deal. Cultures are in many respects individual or unique, and their manifestations are “explained” by correlations with one another and by borrowings due to chance con¬ tacts. The chief, even if not sole, law of their changes is that of transmission from other individualized cultures.
It is no wonder that Historismus has become the pre¬ occupying problem of a whole school of thinkers, many of whom now hold that the only attitude which can be taken toward historic situations and characters is non-intellect¬ ual, being esthetic appreciation, or sympathetic artistic re¬ habilitation. The theory which identifies knowledge with the beholding or grasp of self-sufficient objects reaches an impasse where it comes to deal with histori¬ cal science in contrast with physics. Windelband justly draws the conclusion that Being and knowledge compel “antinomianism,” certain problems inevitably force them¬ selves upon us, but all efforts at solution are hopeless.5 5 “it remains an unsolved problem why timeless reality needs realiza¬ tion in the temporal course of the event or why it tolerates in itself an event in the temporal course of which there is something that differs from its own nature. We do not understand why that which is also has never¬ theless to happen; and still less why something different happens from that which is in itself without time.”
Introduction to Philosophy, English translation, p. 299.
Empirically, individualized objects, unique affairs, exist. But they are evanescent, unstable. They trem¬ ble on the verge of disappearance as soon as they appear. Useful arts prove that, within limits, neglect of their uniqueness and attention to what is common, recurrent, irrelevant to time, procures and perpetuates the happen¬ ing of some of these unique things. Timeless laws, taken by themselves, like all universals, express dialectic intent, not any matter of fact existence. But their ultimate implication is application; they are methods, and when applied as methods they regulate the precarious flow of unique situations. Objects of natural science are not metaphysical rivals of historical events; they are means of directing the latter. Events change; one individual gives place to another. But individually qualified things have some qualities which are pervasive, common, stable. They are out of time in the sense that a particular tem¬ poral quality is irrelevant to them. If anybody feels relieved by calling them eternal, let them be called eternal. But let not “eternal” be then conceived as a kind of absolute perduring existence or Being. It denotes just what it denotes: irrelevance to existence in its temporal quality. These non-temporal, mathematical or logical qualities are capable of abstraction, and of conversion into relations, into temporal, numerical and spatial order.* As such they are dialectical, non-existential.
B For a convincing discussion see Brown’s essay, Intelligence and Mathematics, in the volume, Creative Intelligence, especially the section entitled Things, Relations, and Quantities. “Instead of reducing quali¬ ties to relations, it seems to me a much more intelligible view to conceive relations as abstract ways of taking qualities in general, as qualities thought of in their function of bridging a gap or making a transition be¬ tween two bits of reality that have previously been taken as separate But also as such they are tools, instrumentalities applica¬ ble historic events to help regulate their course.
This entire discussion has but a single point. It aims to show that the problems which constitute modern epistemology with its rival, materialistic, spiritualistic, dualistic doctrines, and rival realistic, idealistic, represen¬ tational theories; and rival doctrines of relation of mind and matter occasionalism, pre-established harmony, paralellism, panpsychism, etc., have a single origin in the dogma which denies temporal quality to reality as such. Such a theory is bound to regard things which are causally explanatory as superior to results and outcomes; for the temporal dependence of the latter cannot be dis¬ guised, while “causes” can be plausibly converted into independent beings, or laws, or other non-temporal forms. As has been pointed out, this denial of change to true Being had its source in bias in favor of objects of con¬ templative enjoyment, together with a theory that such objects are the adequate subject-matter of science.
The bias is spontaneous and legitimate. The accom¬ panying theory of knowledge and reality is a distortion. The legitimate implication of the preference for worthy objects of appreciation is the necessity of art, or control of the sequential order upon which they depend; a neces¬ sity which carries with it the further implication that this order, which is to be discovered by inquiry and confirmed by experimental action, is the proper object of knowledge.
things.” P. 159. Thus “terms, (elements) and relations are both (p. 160) abstract replacements of qualitatively heterogeneous realities of such a sort as “to symbolize their effective nature in particular respect.” The word “effective” brings out the agreement of the text with this point of view, for which I am much indebted to Dr. Brown.
Such a recognition would, however, have conceded the dependence of the contemplative functions of the leisure class upon the appliances and technique of artisans — among whom all artists were included. And since in olden time the practice of the arts was largely routine, fixed by custom and ready-made patterns, such a recognition would have carried with it the need of transforming the arts themselves, if the occurrence of ends was to be a real fulfillment, a realization, and not a contingent accident. The introduction of inventive thought into the arts and the civil emancipation of the industrial class at last made the transformation possible.
When the appliances of a technology that had grown more deliberate were adopted in inquiry, and the lens, pendulum, magnetic needle, lever were used as tools of knowing, and their functions were treated as models to follow in interpreting physical phenomena, science ceased to be identified with appreciative contemplation of noble and ideal objects, was freed from subjection to esthetic perfections, and became an affair of time and history intelligently managed. Ends were in conse¬ quence no longer determined by physical accident and social traditions. Anything whatsoever for which means could be found was an end to be averted or to be secured. Liberation from a fixed scheme of ends made modern science possible. In large affairs, practice precedes the possi¬ bility of observation and formulation; the results of prac¬ tice must accumulate before mind has anything to ob¬ serve. There is little cause for wonder therefore that long after the objects of science had become instrumental¬ ities rather than things in their own rights, the old theory persisted, and philosophy spent much of its effort in the effort to reconcile the traditional theory of knowledge as immediate possession with the terms and conclusions of the new method of practice.
It is characteristic of the inevitable moral pre-posses¬ sion of philosophy, together with the subjective turn of modern thought, that many critics take an “instrumental” theory of knowledge to signify that the value of knowing is instrumental to the knower. This is a matter which is as it may be in particular cases; but certainly in many cases the pursuit of science is sport, carried on, like other sports, for its own satisfaction. But “instrumentalism” is a theory not about personal disposition and satisfaction in knowing, but about the proper objects of science, what is “proper” being defined in terms of physics. ^ The distinction between tools (or things in their ob¬ jectivities) and fulfilled products of the use of tools ac¬ counts for the distinction between known objects on one side and objects of appreciation and affection on the other. But the distinction primarily concerns objects themselves; only secondarily does it apply to attitudes, dispositions, motivations. Making and using tools may be intrinsically delightful. Prior to the introduction of machinery for quantitative production and sale of commodities for profit, utensils were themselves usually works of art, esthetically satisfying. This fact does not however define them as utensils; it does not confer upon them their characteristic property. In like manner, the pursuit of knowledge is often an immediately delightful event; its attained pro¬ ducts possess esthetic qualities of proportion, order, and symmetry. But these qualities do not mark off or define the characteristic and appropriate objects of science. The character of the object is like that of a tool, say a lever; it is an order of determination of sequential changes terminating in a foreseen consequence.
We are brought to the question of method. In ancient science the essence of science was demonstration; the life blood of modern science is discovery. In the former, reflective inquiry existed for the sake of attaining a stable subject-matter; in the latter systematized know¬ ledge exists in practice for the sake of stimulating, guid¬ ing and checking further inquiries. In ancient science, “learning” belonged in the realm of inferior being, of becoming, change; it was transitive, and ceased in the actualization of final and fixed objects. It was thought of after the analogy of master and disciple; the former was already in possession of the truth, and the learner merely appropriated what already is there in the store house of the master. In modern science, learning is finding out what nobody has previously known. It is a transaction in which nature is teacher, and in which the teacher comes to knowledge and truth only through the learning of the inquiring student.
Characteristic differences in logic thus accompany the change from “knowledge” whose subject-matter is final affairs to knowledge dealing with instrumental objects. Where the objects of knowledge are taken to be final, perfect, complete, metaphysical fulfillments of nature, proper method consists in definition and classification; learning closes with demonstration of the rational neces¬ sity of definitions and classifications. Demonstration is an exhibition of the everlasting, universal, final and fixed nature of objects. Investigation denoted merely the accumulation of material with which to fill in gaps in an antecedent ready-made hierarchy of species. Discovery was merely the perception that some particular material hitherto unclassified by the learner came under a universal form already known. The universal is already known be¬ cause given to thought; and theparticular is already known, because given to perception; learning merely brings these two given forms into connection, so that what is “dis¬ covered” is the subsumption of particular under its universal.
Apart from their theories, or in spite of them, the Greeks were possessed by a lively curiosity, and their prac¬ tice was better than their logic. In the medieval Christian period, the logic was taken literally. Revelation, scrip¬ tures, church fathers and other authentic sources, in¬ creased the number of given universal truths, and also of given particular facts and events. The master-teacher was God, who taught not through the dim instrumentality of rational thought alone, but directly through official representatives. The form of apprehension of truth remained the demonstrative syllogism; the store of uni¬ versal truths was supplemented by the, gracious gift of revelation, and the resources of the minor premise ex¬ tended by divinely established historic facts. Truth was given to reason and faith; and the part of the human mind was to humble itself to hearken, accept and obey.
The scheme was logically complete; it carried out under new circumstances the old idea that the highest end and good of man is knowledge of true Being, and that such knowledge in the degree of its possession effects an as¬ similation of the mind to the reality known. It added to old theoretical premises such institutions and practices as were practically required to give them effect, so that the humblest of human creatures might at least start on the road to that knowledge the possession of which is salva¬ tion and bliss. In comparison, most modern theories are an inconsistent mixture; dialectically the modernist is easy prey to the traditionalist; he carries so many of the conceptions of the latter in his intellectual outfit that he is readily confuted. It is his practice not his theory that gets him ahead. His professed logic is still largely that of antecedent truths, demonstration and certitude; his practice is doubting, forming hypotheses, conduct¬ ing experiments. When he surrenders antecedent truths of reason it is usually only to accept antecedent truths of sensation. Thus John Stuart Mill conceives of aninductive logic in which certain canons shall bear exactly the same relation to inquiry into fact that the rules of the syllogism bore to classic “deductive” proof or dialectic. He recog¬ nizes that science is a matter of inference, but he is as cer¬ tain as was Aristotle that inference rests upon certain truths which are immediately possessed, differing only about the organ through which they come into our pos¬ session.
But in the practice of science, knowledge is an affair of making sure, not of grasping antecedently given sureties. What is already known, what is accepted as truth, is of immense importance; inquiry could not proceed a step without it. But it is held subject to use, and is at the mercy of the discoveries which it makes possible. It has to be adjusted to the latter and not the latter to it. When things are defined as instruments, their value and validity reside in what proceeds from them; consequences not antecedents supply meaning and verity. Truths al¬ ready possessed may have practical or moral certainty, but logically they never lose a hypothetic quality. They are true if: if certain other things eventually present themselves; and when these latter things occur they in turn suggest further possibilities; the operation of doubtinquiry-finding recurs. Although science is concerned in practice with the contingent and its method is that of making hypotheses which are then tried out in actual experimental change of physical conditions, its traditional formulation persists in terms of necessary and fixed objects. Hence all kinds of incoherences occur. The more stubbornly the traditional formulation is clung to, the more serious become these inconsistencies.
Leonardo virtually announced the birth of the method of modern science when he said that true knowledge be¬ gins with opinion. The saying involves a revolution; no other statement could be so shocking to the traditional logic. Not that opinion as such is anything more than opinion or an unconfirmed and unwarranted surmise; but that such surmises may be used; when employed as hypotheses they induce experimentation. They then become fore-runners of truth, and mind is released from captivity to antecedent beliefs. Opinion, in the classic conception, was concerned with what was inherently contingent and variable as to possibility and probabil¬ ity, in contrast with knowledge concerned with the inherently necessary and everlasting. It therefore was as ultimate and unquestionable in its proper sphere as science was in its place. But opinion as a venture, as an “it seems to me probable,” is an occasion of new observa¬ tions, an instigator of research, an indispensable organ in deliberate discovery. Taken in this fashion, opinion was the source of new histories, the beginning of operations that terminated in new conclusions. Its worth lay neither in itself nor in a peculiar realm of objects to which it was applied, but in the direction of inquiries which it set agoing. It was a starting point, and like any beginning of any history was altered and displaced in the history of which it was the initiation.
Sometimes discovery is treated as a proof of the op¬ posite of which it actually shows. It is viewed as evi¬ dence that the object of knowledge is already there in full-fledged being and that we just run across it; we un¬ cover it as treasure-hunters find a chest of buried gold. That there is existence antecedent to search and dis¬ covery is of course admitted; but it is denied that as such, as other than the conclusion of the historical event of inquiry in its connection with other histories, it is already the object of knowledge. The Norsemen are said to have discovered America. But in what sense? They landed on its shores after a stormy voyage; there was discovery in the sense of hitting upon a land hitherto untrod by Europeans. But unless the newly found and seen object was used to modify old beliefs, to change the sense of the old map of the earth, there was no discovery in any pregnant intellectual sense, any more than mere stumbling over a chair in the dark is discovery till used as basis of inference which connects the stumbling with a body of meanings. Discovery of America involved in¬ sertion of the newly touched land in a map of the globe. This insertion, moreover, was not merely additive, but transformative of a prior picture of the world as to its surfaces and their arrangements. It may be replied that it was not the world which was changed but only the map.
To which there is the obvious retort that after all the map is part of the world, not something outside it, and that its meaning and bearings are so important that a change in the map involves other and still more impor¬ tant objective changes.
It was not simply states of consciousness or ideas inside the heads of men that were altered when America was actually discovered; the modification was one in the public meaning of the world in which men publicly act. To cut off this meaning from the world is to leave us in a situation where it makes no difference what change takes place in the world; one wave more or less in a puddle is of no account. Changing the meaning of the world effected an existential change. The map of the world is something more than a piece of linen hung on a wall. A new world does not appear without profound transformations in the old one; a discovered America was a factor interacting with Europe and Asia to produce consequences previously impossible. A potential object of further exploration and discoveries now existed in Europe itself; a source of gold; an opportunity for adventure; an outlet for crowded and depressed populations, an abode for exiles and the discounted, an appeal to energy and invention: in short, an agency of new events and fruitions, at home as well as abroad. In some degree, every genuine discovery creates some such transformation of both the meanings and the existences of nature.
Modern idealistic theories of knowledge have dis¬ played some sense of the method and objective of science. They have apprehended the fact that the object of know¬ ledge implies that the found rather than the given is the proper subject matter of science. Recognizing the part played by intelligence in this finding, they have framed a theory of the constitutive operation of mind in the determination of real objects. But idealism, while it has had an intimation of the constructively in¬ strumental office of intelligence, has mistranslated the discovery. Following the old tradition, in its exclusive identification of the object of knowledge with reality, equating truth and Being, it was forced to take the work of thought absolutely and wholesale, instead of relatively and in detail. That is, it took re-constitution to be constitution; re-construction to be construction. Accepting the premise of the equivalence of Reality with the attained object of knowledge, idealism had no way of noting that thought is intermediary between some em¬ pirical objects and others. Hence an office of transforma¬ tion was converted into an act of original and final creation. A conversion of actual immediate objects into better, into more secure and significant, objects was treated as a movement from merely apparent and phenomental Being to the truly Real. In short, idealism is guilty of neglect that thought and knowledge are histories.
To call action of thought in constituting objects direct is the same as to say that it is miraculous. For it is not thought as idealism defines thought which exercises the reconstructive function. Only action, interaction, can change or remake objects. The analogy of the skilled artist still holds. His intelligence is a factor in forming new objects which mark a fulfillment. But this is be¬ cause intelligence is incarnate in overt action, using things as means to affect other things. “Thought,” reason, intelligence, whatever word we choose to use, is existentially an adjective (or better an adverb), not a noun. It is disposition of activity, a quality of that conduct which foresees consequences of existing events, and which uses what is foreseen as a plan and method of administering affairs.
This theory, explicitly about thought as a condition of science, is actually a theory about nature. It involves attribution to nature of three defining characteristics. In the first place, it is implied that some natural events are endings whether enjoyed or obnoxious, which occur, apart from reflective choice and art, only casually, without control. In the second place, it implies that events, being events and not rigid and lumpy substances, are ongoing and hence as such unfinished, incomplete, in¬ determinate. Consequently they possess a possibility of being so managed and steered that ends may become fulfilments not just termini, conclusions not just closings. Suspense, doubt, hypotheses, experiment with alterna¬ tives are exponents of this phase of nature. In the third place, regulation of ongoing and incomplete processes in behalf of selected consequences, implies that there are orders of sequence and coexistence involved; these orders or relations when ascertained are intellectual means which enable us to use events as concrete means of di¬ recting the course of affairs to forecast conclusions.