THE BOOK WAS
DRENCHED
s fc
8]<ou 1
>K.
599
1 66297
JNIVERS/
LIBRARY
OSMANIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
Call No. 1*1/1)51^. Accession No.
Author t> e tO $ j T-
This book shprfd be returned on or before the date last marked below.
THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
HUMAN NATURE AND CONDUCT
THE PUBLIC AND ITS PROBLEMS
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
CHARACTERS AND EVENTS
THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
A STUDY OF THE RELATION OF
KNOWLEDGE AND ACTION
By
JOHN DEWEY
GIFFORD LECTURES 1929
LONDON
GEORGE ALLEN # UNWIN LTD
MUSEUM STREET
FIRST PUBLISHED IN GREAT BRITAIN IN IO1O
COPYRIGHT IN THE U.S. A
All rights reserved
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
UNWIN BROTHERS. LTD., WOKING
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PACK
T. ESCAPE FROM PERIL 7
ii. PHILOSOPHY'S SEARCH FOR THE IMMUTABLE 28
II. CONFLICT OF AUTHORITIES 5O
tV. THE ART OF ACCEPTANCE AND THE ART OF CONTROL 73
V. IDEAS AT WORK 1 05
VI. THE PLAY OF IDEAS 135
VII. THE SEAT OF INTELLECTUAL AUTHORITY 163
VIII. THE NATURALIZATION OF INTELLIGENCE 187
IX. THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD 213
X. THE CONSTRUCTION OF GOOD 242
XI. THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTIOl^ 273
INDEX 299
THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
CHAPTER I
ESCAPE FROM PERIL
MAN WHO LIVES IN a world of hazards is compelled to seek
for security. He has sought to attain it in two ways. One of
them began with an attempt to propitiate the powers which
environ him and determine his destiny. It expressed itself in
supplication, sacrifice, ceremonial rite and magical cult. In time
these crude methods were largely displaced. The sacrifice of a
contrite heart was esteemed more pleasing than that of bulls
and oxen; the inner attitude of reverence and devotion more
desirable than external ceremonies. If man could not conquer
destiny he could willingly ally himself with it; putting his
will, even in sore affliction, on the side of the powers which
dispense fortune, he could escape defeat and might triumph in
the midst of destruction.
The other course is to invent arts and by their means turn
the powers of nature to account ; man constructs a fortress out
of the very conditions and forces which threaten him. He
builds shelters, weaves garments, makes flame his friend instead
of his enemy, and grows into the complicated arts of associated
living. This is the method of changing the world through
action, as the other is the method of changing the self in emo-
tion and idea. It is a commentary on the slight control man
has obtained over himself by means of control over nature, that
the method of action has been felt to manifest dangerous pride,
even defiance of the powers which be. People of old wavered
between thinking arts to be the gift of the gods and to be an
invasion of their prerogatives. Both versions testify to the sense
of something extraordinary in the arts, something either super-
human or unnatural. The souls who have predicted that by
8 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
means of the arts man might establish a kingdom of order,
justice and beauty through mastery of nature's energies and
laws have been few and little heeded.
Men have been glad enough to enjoy the fruits of such
arts as they possess, and in recent centuries have increasingly
devoted themselves to their multiplication. But this effort has
been conjoined with a profound distrust of the arts as a method
of dealing with the serious perils of life. Doubt as to the truth
of this statement will be dispelled if one considers the dis-
esteem in which the idea of practice has been held. Philosophers
have celebrated the method of change in personal ideas, and
religious teachers that of change in the affections of the heart.
These conversions have been prized on their own account, and
only incidentally because of a change in action which would
ensue. The latter has been esteemed as an evidence of the
change in thought and sentiment, not as a method of trans-
forming the scene of life. The places in which the use of the
arts has effected actual objective transformation have been
regarded as inferior, if not base, and the activities connected
with them as menial. The disparagement attending the idea of
the material has seized upon them. The honourable quality
associated with the idea of the "spiritual" has been reserved
for change in inner attitudes.
The depreciation of action, of doing and making, has been
cultivated by philosophers. But while philosophers have per-
petuated the derogation by formulating and justifying it, they
did not originate it. They glorified their own office without
doubt in placing theory so much above practice. But indepen-
dently of their attitude, many things conspired to the same
effect. Work has been onerous, toilsome, associated with a
primeval curse. It has been done under compulsion and the
pressure of necessity, while intellectual activity is associated
with leisure. On account of the unpleasantness of practical
activity, as much of it as possible has been put upon slaves and
serfs. Thus the social dishonour in which this class was held
ESCAPE FROM PERIL <j
was extended to the work they do. There is also the age-long
association of knowing and thinking with immaterial and
spiritual principles, and of the arts, of all practical activity in
doing and making, with matter. For work is done with the
body, by means of mechanical appliances, and is directed upon
material things. The disrepute which has attended the thought
of material things in comparison with immaterial thought has
been transferred to everything associated with practice.
One might continue in this strain. The natural history of
conceptions about work and the arts if it were traced through
a succession of peoples and cultures would be instructive. But
all that is needed for our purpose is to raise the question : Why
this invidious discrimination ? A very little reflection shows that
the suggestions which have been offered by way of explanation
themselves need to be explained. Ideas derived from social
castes and emotional revulsions are hardly reasons to be offered
in justification of a belief, although they may have a bearing
on its causation. Contempt for matter and bodies and glorifica-
tion of the immaterial are affairs which are not self-explana-
tory. And, as we shall be at some pains to show later in the
discussion, the idea which connects thinking and knowing with
some principle or force that is wholly separate from connection
with physical things will not stand examination, especially since
the whole-hearted adoption of experimental method in the
natural sciences.
The questions suggested have far-reaching issues. What is
the cause and the import of, the sharp division between theory
and practice ? Why should the latter be disesteemed along with
matter and the body? What has been the effect upon the
various modes in which action is manifested: industry, politics,
the fine arts, and upon morals conceived of as overt activity
having consequences, instead of as mere inner personal attitude ?
How has the separation of intellect from action affected the
theory of knowledge? What has been in particular the effect
upon the conception and course of philosophy? What forces
io THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
are at work to break down the division? What would the
effect be if the divorce were annulled, and knowing and doing
were brought into intrinsic connection with one another? What
revisions of the traditional theory of mind, thought and know-
ing would be required, and what change in the idea of the office
of philosophy would be demanded ? What modifications would
ensue in the disciplines which are concerned with the various
phases of human activity ?
These questions form the theme of this book, and indicate
the nature of the problems to be discussed. In this opening
chapter we shall consider especially some historic grounds for
the elevation of knowledge above making and doing. This
phase of the discussion will disclose that exaltation of pure
intellect and its activity above practical affairs is fundamentally
connected with the quest for a certainty which shall be absolute
and unshakeable. The distinctive characteristic of practical
activity, one which is so inherent that it cannot be eliminated,
is the uncertainty which attends it. Of it we are compelled to
say: Act, but act at your peril. Judgment and belief regarding
actions to be performed can never attain more than a pre-
carious probability. Through thought, however, it has seemed
that men might escape from the perils of uncertainty.
Practical activity deals with individualized and unique
situations which are never exactly duplicable and about which,
accordingly, no complete assurance is possible. All activity,
moreover, involves change. The intellect, however, according
to the traditional doctrine, may grasp universal Being, and
Being which is universal is fixed and immutable. Wherever
there is practical activity we human beings are involved as par-
takers in the issue. All the fear, disesteem and lack of confi-
dence which gather about the thought of ourselves, cluster also
about the thought of the actions in which we are partners.
Man's distrust of himself has caused him to desire to get
beyond and above himself; in pure knowledge he has thought
he could attain this self-transcendence.
ESCAPE FROM PERIL 11
There is no need to expatiate upon the risk which attends
overt action. The burden of proverbs and wise saws is that the
best laid plans of men as of mice gang agley. Fortune rather
than our own intent and act determines eventual success and
failure. The pathos of unfulfilled expectation, the tragedy of
defeated purpose and ideals, the catastrophes of accident, are
the commonplaces of all comment on the human scene. We
survey conditions, make the wisest choice we can; we act, and
we must trust the rest to fate, fortune or providence. Moralists
tell us to look to the end when we act and then inform us that
the end is always uncertain. Judging, planning, choice, no
matter how thoroughly conducted, and action no matter how
prudently executed, never are the sole determinants of any
outcome. Alien and indifferent natural forces, unforeseeable
conditions, enter in and have a decisive voice. The more impor-
tant the issue, the greater is their say as to the ulterior event.
Hence men have longed to find a realm in which there is
an activity which is not overt and which has no external conse-
quences. "Safety first" has played a large role in effecting a
preference for knowing over doing and making. With those to
whom the process of pure thinking is congenial and who have
the leisure and the aptitude to pursue their preference, the
happiness attending knowing is unalloyed ; it is not entangled
in the risks which overt action cannot escape. Thought has been
alleged to be a purely inner activity, intrinsic to mind alone;
and according to traditional classic doctrine, "mind" is complete
and self-sufficient in itself. Overt action may follow upon its
operations but in an external way, a way not intrinsic to its
completion. Since rational activity is complete within itself it
needs no external manifestation. Failure and frustration are
attributed to the accidents of an alien, intractable and inferior
realm of existence. The outer lot of thought is cast in a world
external to it, but one which in no way injures the supremacy
and completeness of thought and knowledge in their intrinsic
natures.
12 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
Thus the arts by which man attains such practical security
as is possible of achievement are looked down upon. The
security they provide is relative, ever incomplete, at the risk of
untoward circumstance. /The multiplication of arts may even
be bemoaned as a source of new dangers. Each of them
demands its own measures of protection. Each one in its opera-
tion brings with it new and unexpected consequences having
perils for which we are not prepared. The quest for certainty
is a quest for a peace which is assured, an object which is un-
qualified by risk and the shadow of fear which action casts.
For it is not uncertainty per se which men dislike, but the fact
that uncertainty involves us in peril of evils. Uncertainty that
affected only the detail of consequences to be experienced pro-
vided they had a warrant of being enjoyable would have no
sting. It would bring the zest of adventure and the spice of
variety. Quest for complete certainty can be fulfilled in pure
knowing alone. Such is the verdict of our most enduring
philosophic tradition.
While the tradition has, as we shall see later, found its way
into all themes and subjects, and determines the form of current
problems and conclusions regarding mind and knowledge, it
may be doubted whether if we were suddenly released from
the burden of tradition we should, on the basis of present
experience, take the disparaging view of practice and the exalted
view of knowledge apart from action which tradition dictates.
For man, in spite of the new perils in which the machinery of
his new arts of production and transportation have involved
him, has learned to play with sources of danger. He even seeks
them out, weary of the routine of a too sheltered life. The
enormous change taking place in the position of women is itself,
for example, a commentary on a change of attitude toward the
value of protection as an end in itself. We have attained, at
least subconsciously, a certain feeling of confidence ; a feeling
that control of the main conditions of fortune is to an appre-
ciable degree passing into our own hands. We live surrounded
ESCAPE FROM PERIL 13
with the protection of thousands of arts and we have devised
schemes of insurance which mitigate and distribute the evils
which accrue. Barring the fears which war leaves in its train,
it is perhaps a safe speculation that if contemporary western
man were completely deprived of all the old beliefs about
knowledge and actions, he would assume, with a fair degree of
confidence, that it lies within his power to achieve a reasonable
degree of security in life.
This suggestion is speculative. Acceptance of it is not needed
by the argument. It has its value as an indication of the earlier
conditions in which a felt need for assurance was the dominant
emotion. For primitive man had none of the elaborate arts of
protection and use Avhich we now enjoy and no confidence in
his own powers when they were reinforced by appliances of art.
He lived under conditions in which he was extraordinarily
exposed to peril, and at the same time he was without the
means of defence which are to-day matters of course. Most of
our simplest tools and utensils did not exist; there was no
accurate foresight; man faced the forces of nature in a state
of nakedness which was more than physical ; save under un-
usually benign conditions he was beset with dangers that knew
no remission. In consequence, mystery attended experiences of
good and evil ; they could not be traced to their natural causes
and they seemed to be the dispensations, the gifts and the
inflictions, of powers beyond possibility of control. The pre-
carious crises of birth, puberty, illness, death, war, famine,
plague, the uncertainties of the hunt, the vicissitudes of climate
and the great seasonal changes, kept imagination occupied with
the uncertain. Any scene or object that was implicated in any
conspicuous tragedy or triumph, in no matter how accidental
a way, got a peculiar significance. It was seized upon as a
harbinger of good or as an omen of evil. Accordingly, some
things were cherished as means of encompassing safety, just as
a good artisan to-day looks after his tools ; others were feared
and shunned because of their potencies for harm.
i 4 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
As a drowning man is said to grasp at a straw, so men who
lacked the instruments and skills developed in later days
snatched at whatever, by any stretch of imagination, could be
regarded as a source of help in time of trouble. The attention,
interest and care which now go to acquiring skill in the use
of appliances and to the invention of means for better service
of ends, were devoted to noting omens, making irrelevant
prognostications, performing ritualistic ceremonies and mani-
pulating objects possessed of magical power over natural
events. In such an atmosphere primitive religion was born and
fostered. Rather, this atmosphere was the religious disposition.
Search for alliance with means which might promote pros-
perity and which would afford defence against hostile powers
was constant. While this attitude was most marked in connec-
tion with the recurrent crises of life, yet the boundary line
between these crucial affairs with their extraordinary risks and
everyday acts was shadowy. The acts that related to common-
place things and everyday occupations were usually accom-
panied, for good measure of security, by ritual acts. The
making of a weapon, the moulding of a bowl, the weaving of a
mat, the sowing of seed, the reaping of a harvest, required acts
different in kind to the technical skills employed. These other
acts had a special solemnity and were thought necessary in order
to ensure the success of the practical operations used.
While it is difficult to avoid the use of the word supernatural,
we must avoid the meaning the word has for us. As long as
there was no defined area of the natural, that which is over
and beyond the natural can have no significance. The distinc-
tion, as anthropological students have pointed out, was between
ordinary and extraordinary; between the prosaic, usual run of
events and the crucial incident or irruption which determined
the direction which the average and expected course of events
took. But the two realms were in no way sharply demarcated
from each other. There was a no-man's-land, a vague territory,
in which they overlapped. At any moment the extraordinary
ESCAPE FROM PERIL 15
might invade the commonplace and either wreck it or clothe it
with some surprising glory. The use of ordinary things under
critical conditions was fraught with inexplicable potentialities
of good and evil.
The two dominant conceptions, cultural categories one
might call them, which grew and flourished under such circum-
stances were those of the Jioly and the fortunate, with their
opposites, the profane and the unlucky. As with the idea of the
supernatural, meanings are not to be assigned on the basis of
present usage. Everything which was charged with some extra-
ordinary potency for benefit or injury was holy; holiness
meant necessity for being approached with ceremonial scruples.
The holy thing, whether place, object, person or ritual appli-
ance, has its sinister face; "to be handled with care" is written
upon it. From it there issues the command: Noli me t anger e,
Tabus, a whole set of prohibitions and injunctions, gather about
it. It is capable of transmitting its mysterious potency to other
things. To secure the favour of the holy is to be on the road tc
success, while any conspicuous success is proof of the favoui
of some overshadowing power a fact which politicians of all
ages have known how to utilize. Because of its surcharge of
power, ambivalent in quality, the holy has to be approached
not only with scruples but in an attitude of subjection. There
are rites of purification, humiliation, fasting and prayer which
are preconditions of securing its favour.
The holy is the bearer of blessing or fortune. But a differ-
ence early developed between the ideas of the holy and the
lucky, because of the different dispositions in which each was
to be approached. A lucky object is something to be used. It is
to be manipulated rather than approached with awe. It calls
for incantations, spells, divinations rather than for supplication
and humiliation. Moreover, the lucky thing tends to be a
concrete and tangible object, while the holy one is not usually
definitely localized; it is the more potent in the degree in
which its habitation and form are vague. The lucky object is
1 6 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
subject to pressure, at a pinch to coercion, to scolding and
punishment. It might be discarded if it failed to bring luck.
There developed a certain element of mastery in its use, in
distinction from the dependence and subjection which remained
the proper attitude toward the holy. Thus there was a kind
of rhythm of domination and submission, of imprecation and
supplication, of utilization and communion.
Such statements give, of course, a one-sided picture. Men at
all times have gone about many things in a matter-of-fact way
and have had their daily enjoyments. Even in the ceremonies
of which we have spoken there entered the ordinary love of
the dramatic as well as the desire for repetition, once routine
was established. Primitive man early developed some tools and
some modes of skill. With them went prosaic knowledge of
the properties of ordinary things. But these beliefs were sur-
rounded by others of an imaginative and emotional type, and
were more or less submerged in the latter. Moreover, prestige
attached to the latter. Just because some beliefs were matter-
of-fact they did not have the weight and authority that belong
to those about the extraordinary and unaccountable. We find
the same phenomenon repeated to-day wherever religious
beliefs have marked vitality.
Prosaic beliefs about verifiable facts, beliefs backed up by
evidence of the senses and by useful fruits, had little glamour
and prestige compared with the vogue of objects of rite and
ceremony. Hence the things forming their subject-matter were
felt to be lower in rank. Familiarity breeds a sense of equality
if not of contempt. We deem ourselves on a par with things we
daily administer. It is a truism to say that objects regarded
with awe have perforce a superior status. Herein is the source
of the fundamental dualism of human attention and regard.
The distinction between the two attitudes of everyday control
and dependence on something superior was finally generalized
intellectually. It took effect in the conception of two distinct
realms. The inferior was that in which man could foresee and
ESCAPE FROM PERIL 17
in which he had instruments and arts by which he might expect
a reasonable degree of control. The superior was that of occur-
rences so uncontrollable that they testified to the presence and
operation of powers beyond the scope of everyday and mundane
things.
The philosophical tradition regarding knowledge and prac-
tice, the immaterial or spiritual and the material, was not
original and primitive. It had for its background the state of
culture which has been sketched. It developed in a social
atmosphere in which the division of the ordinary and extra-
ordinary was domesticated. Philosophy reflected upon it and
gave it a rational formulation and justification. The bodies of
information that corresponded to the everyday arts, the store
of matter-of-fact knowledge, were things men knew because of
what they did. They were products and promises of utilities.
They shared in the relatively low esteem belonging to such
things in comparison with the extraordinary and divine.
Philosophy inherited the realm with which religion had been
concerned. Its mode of knowing was different from that accom-
panying the empirical arts, just because it dealt with a realm
of higher Being. It breathed an air purer than that in which
exist the making and doing that relate to livelihood, just as
the activities which took the form of rites and ceremonies were
nobler and nearer the divine than those spent in toil.
The change from religion to philosophy was so great in
form that their identity as to content is easily lost from view.
The form ceases to be that of the story told in imaginative and
emotional style, and becomes that of rational discourse observ-
ing the canons of logic. It is well known that that portion of
Aristotle's system which later generations have called meta-
physics he called First Philosophy. It is possible to quote from
him sentences descriptive of "First Philosophy" which make it
seem that the philosophic enterprise is a coldly rational one,
objective and analytic. Thus he says it is the most comprehen-
sive of all branches of knowledge because it has for its subject-
B
i8 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
matter definition of the traits which belong to all forms of
Being whatsoever, however much they may differ from one
another in detail.
But when these passages are placed in the context they had
in Aristotle's own mind, it is clear that the comprehensiveness
and universality of first philosophy are not of a strictly analytic
sort. They mark a distinction with respect to grade of value and
title to reverence. For he explicitly identifies his first philosophy
or metaphysics with theology; he says it is higher than
other sciences. For these deal with generation and production,
while its subject-matter permits of demonstrative, that is neces-
sary, truth; and its objects are divine and such as are meet for
God to occupy himself with. Again, he says that the objects
of philosophy are such as are the causes of as much of the
divine as is manifest to us, and that if the divine is anywhere
present, it is present in things of the sort with which philosophy
deals. The supremacy of worth and dignity of these objects
is also made clear in the statement that the Being with which
philosophy is occupied is primary, eternal and self-sufficient,
because its nature is the Good, so that the Good is among the
first principles which are philosophy's subject-matter: yet
not, it must be understood, the good in the sense in which it
has meaning and standing in human life but the inherently
and eternally perfect, that which is complete and self-
sufficient.
Aristotle tells us that from remote antiquity tradition has
handed down the idea, in story form, that the heavenly bodies
are gods, and that the divine encompasses the entire natural
world. This core of truth, he goes on to say in effect, was em-
broidered with myths for the benefit of the masses, for reasons
of expediency, namely, the preservation of social institutions.
The negative work of philosophy was then to strip away these
imaginative accretions. From the standpoint of popular belief
this was its chief work, and it was a destructive one. The masses
only felt that their religion was attacked. But the enduring
ESCAPE FROM PERIL 19
contribution was positive. The belief that the divine encom-
passes the world was detached from its mythical context and
made the basis of philosophy, and it became also the foundation
of physical science as is suggested by the remark that the
heavenly bodies are gods. Telling the story of the universe in,'
the form of rational discourse instead of emotionalized imagi-
nation signified the discovery of logic as a rational science.,
Conformity on the part of supreme reality to the requirements
of logic conferred upon its constitutive objects necessary and
immutable characteristics. Pure contemplation of these forms
was man's highest and most divine bliss, a communion with
unchangeable truth.
The geometry of Euclid doubtless gave the clue to logic
as the instrument of translation of what was sound in opinion
into the forms of rational discourse. Geometry seemed to
reveal the possibility of a science which owed nothing to
observation and sense beyond mere exemplification in figures
or diagrams. It seemed to disclose a world of ideal (or non-
sensible) forms which were connected with one another by
eternal and necessary relations which reason alone could
trace. This discovery was generalized by philosophy into
the doctrine of a realm of fixed Being which, when grasped
by thought, formed a complete system of immutable and
necessary truth.
If one looks at the foundations of the philosophies of Plato
and Aristotle as an anthropologist looks at his material, that
is, as cultural subject-matter, it is clear that these philosophies
were systematizations in rational form of the content of Greek
religious and artistic beliefs. The systematization involved a
purification. Logic provided the patterns to which ultimately
real objects had to conform, while physical science was pos-
sible in the degree in which the natural world, even in its
mutabilities, exhibited exemplification of ultimate immutable
rational objects. Thus, along with the elimination of myths and
grosser superstitions, there were set up the ideals of science and
20 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
of a life of reason. Ends which could justify themselves to
reason were to take the place of custom as the guide of conduct.
These two ideals form a permanent contribution to western
civilization.
But with all our gratitude for these enduring gifts, we
cannot forget the conditions which attended them. For they
brought with them the idea of a higher realm of fixed reality
of which alone true science is possible and of an inferior world
of changing things with which experience and practical matters
are concerned. They glorified the invariant at the expense of
change, it being evident that all practical activity falls within
the realm of change. It bequeathed the notion, which has ruled
philosophy ever since the time of the Greeks, that the office of
knowledge is to uncover the antecedently real, rather than, as
is the case with our practical judgments, to gain the kind of
understanding which is necessary to deal with problems as they
arise.
In fixing this conception of knowledge it established also,
as far as philosophies of the classic type are concerned, the
special task of philosophic inquiry. As a form of knowledge it
is concerned with the disclosure of the Real in itself, of Being
in and of itself. It is differentiated from other modes of know-
ing by its preoccupation with a higher and more ultimate form
of Being than that with which the sciences of nature are con-
cerned. As far as it occupied itself at all with human conduct, it
was to superimpose upon acts ends said to flow from the nature
of reason. It thus diverted thought from inquiring into the
purposes which experience of actual conditions suggests and
from concrete means of their actualization. It translated into a
rational form the doctrine of escape from the vicissitudes of
existence by means of measures which do not demand an active
coping with conditions. For deliverance by means of rites and
cults, it substituted deliverance through reason. This deliver-
ance was an intellectual, a theoretical affair, constituted by a
knowledge to be attained apart from practical activity.
ESCAPE FROM PERIL 21
The realms of knowledge and action were each divided into
two regions. It is not to be inferred that Greek philosophy
separated activity from knowing. It connected them. But it
distinguished activity from action that is, from making and
doing. Rational and necessary knowledge was treated, as in
the celebrations of it by Aristotle, as an ultimate, self-sufficient
and self-enclosed form of self-originated and self-conducted
activity. It was ideal and eternal, independent of change and
hence of the world in which men act and live, the world we
experience perceptibly and practically. "Pure activity" was
sharply marked off from practical action. The latter, whether
in the industrial or the fine arts, in morals or in politics, was
concerned with an inferior region of Being in which change
rules, and which accordingly has Being only by courtesy, for
it manifests deficiency of sure footing in Being by the very fact
of change. It is infected with wow-being.
On the side of knowledge, the division carried with it a
difference between knowledge, in its full sense, and belief. The
former is demonstrative, necessary that is, sure. Belief on the
contrary is only opinion; in its uncertainty and mere prob-
ability, it relates to the world of change as knowledge corre-
sponds to the realm of true reality. This fact brings the discus-
sion around once more to our special theme as far as it affects
the conception of the office and nature of philosophy. That man
has two modes, two dimensions, of belief cannot be doubted.
He has beliefs about actual existences and the course of events,
and he has beliefs about ends to be striven for, policies to be
adopted, goods to be attained and evils to be averted. The most
urgent of all practical problems concerns the connection the
subject-matters of these two kinds of beliefs sustain to each
other. How shall our most authentic and dependable cognitive
beliefs be used to regulate our practical beliefs ? How shall
the latter serve to organize and integrate our intellectual
beliefs?
There is a genuine possibility that the true problem of
22 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
philosophy is connected with precisely this type of question.
Man has beliefs which scientific inquiry vouchsafes, beliefs
about the actual structure and processes of things ; and he also
has beliefs about the values which should regulate his conduct.
The question of how these two ways of believing may most
effectively and fruitfully interact with one another is the most
general and significant of all the problems which life presents
to us. Some reasoned discipline, one obviously other than any
science, should deal with this issue. Thus there is supplied one
way of conceiving of the function of philosophy. But from this
mode of defining philosophy we are estopped by the chief
philosophical tradition. For according to it the realms of know-
ledge and of practical action have no inherent connection with
each other. Here then is the focus to which the various elements
in our discussion converge. We may then profitably recapitu-
late. The realm of the practical is the region of change, and
change is always contingent ; it has in it an element of chance
that cannot be eliminated. If a thing changes, its alteration
is convincing evidence of its lack of true or complete Being.
What is, in the full and pregnant sense of the world, is always,
eternally. It is self-contradictory for that which is to alter. If,
it had no defect or imperfection in it, how could it change?
That which becomes merely comes to be, never truly is. It is
infected with non-being ; with privation of Being in the perfect
sense. The world of generation is the world of decay and
destruction. Wherever one thing comes into being something
else passes out of being.
Thus the depreciation of practice was given a philosophic,
an ontological, justification. Practical action, as distinct from
self-revolving rational self-activity, belongs in the realm of
generation and decay, a realm inferior in value as in Being,
In form, the quest for absolute certainty has reached its goal.
Because ultimate Being or reality is fixed, permanent, admit-
ting of no change or variation, it may be grasped by rational
intuition and set forth in rational, that is, universal and neces-
ESCAPE FROM PERIL 23
sary, demonstration. I do not doubt that there was a feeling
before the rise of philosophy that the unalterably fixed and the
absolutely certain are one, or that change is the source from
which comes all our uncertainties and woes. But in philosophy
this inchoate feeling was definitely formulated. It was asserted
on grounds held to be as demonstrably necessary as are the
conclusions of geometry and logic. Thus the predisposition of
philosophy toward the universal, invariant and eternal was
fixed. It remains the common possession of the entire classic
philosophic tradition.
All parts of the scheme hang together. True Being or
Reality is complete; in being complete, it is perfect, divine,
immutable, the " unmoved mover ". Then there are things that
change, that come and go, that are generated and perish,
because of lack of the stability which participation in ultimate
Being along confers. These changes, however, have form and
character and are knowable in the degree in which they tend
toward an end which is the fulfilment and completion of the
changes in question. Their instability is not absolute but is
marked by aspiration toward a goal.
The perfect and complete is rational thought, the ultimate
"end" or terminus of all natural movement. That which
changes, which becomes and passes away, is material; change
defines the physical. At most and best, it is a potentiality of
reaching a stable and fixed end. To these two realms belong two
sorts of knowledge. One of them is alone knowledge in the
full sense, science. This has a rational, necessary and unchang-
ing form. It is certain. The other, dealing with change, is
belief or opinion ; empirical and particular ; it is contingent, a
matter of probability, not of certainty. The most it can assert
is that things are so and so "upon the whole", usually. Corre-
sponding to the division in Being and in knowledge is that in
activities. Pure activity is rational; it is theoretical, in the sense
in which theory is apart from practical action. Then there is
action in doing and making, occupied with the needs and defects
24 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
of the lower realm of change in which, in his physical nature,
man is implicated.
Although this Greek formulation was made long ago and
much of it is now strange in its specific terms, certain features
of it are as relevant to present thought as they were significant
in their original formulation. For in spite of the great, the
enormous changes in the subject-matter and method of the
sciences and the tremendous expansion of practical activities by
means of arts and technologies, the main tradition of western
culture has retained intact this framework of ideas. Perfect
certainty is what man wants. It cannot be found by practical
doing or making; these take effect in an uncertain future, and
involve peril, the risk of misadventure, frustration and failure.
Knowledge, on the other hand, is thought to be concerned with
a region of being which is fixed in itself. Being eternal and
unalterable, human knowing is not to make any difference in
it. It can be approached through the medium of the appre-
hensions and demonstrations of thought, or by some other
organ of mind, which does nothing to the real, except just to
know it.
There is involved in these doctrines a whole system of
philosophical conclusions. The first and foremost is that there
is complete correspondence between knowledge in its true
meaning and what is real. What is known, what is true for
cognition, is what is real in being. The objects of knowledge
form the standards of measures of the reality of all other
objects of experience. Are the objects of the affections, of desire,
effort, choice, that is to say everything to which we attach
value, real? Yes, if they can be warranted by knowledge; if we
can know objects having these value properties, we are justified
in thinking them real. But as objects of desire and purpose
they have no sure place in Being until they are approached and
validated through knowledge. The idea is so familiar that we
overlook the unexpressed premise upon which it rests, namely
that only the completely fixed and unchanging can be real.
ESCAPE FROM PERIL 25
/The quest for certitude has determined our basic meta-
' physics.
Secondly, the theory of knowledge has its basic premises
fixed by the same doctrine. For knowledge to be certain must
relate to that which has antecedent existence or essential being.
There are certain things which are alone inherently the proper
objects of knowledge and science. Things in the production of
which we participate we cannot know in the true sense of the
word, for such things succeed instead of preceding our action.
What concerns action forms the realm of mere guesswork and
probability, as distinct from the warrant of rational assurance
which is the ideal of true knowledge. We are so accustomed to
the separation of knowledge from doing and making that we
fail to recognize how it controls our conceptions of mind, of
consciousness and of reflective inquiry. For as relates to genuine
knowledge, these must all be defined, on the basis of the
premise, so as not to admit of the presence of any overt
action that modifies conditions having prior and independent
existence.
Special theories of knowledge differ enormously from one
another. Their quarrels with one another fill the air. The din
thus created makes us deaf to the way in which they say one
thing in common. The controversies are familiar. Some theories
ascribe the ultimate test of knowledge to impressions passively
received, forced upon us whether we will or no. Others ascribe
the guarantee of knowledge to synthetic activity of the intellect.
Idealistic theories hold that mind and the object known are
ultimately one ; realistic doctrines reduce knowledge to aware-
ness of what exists independently, and so on. But they all make
one common assumption. They all hold that the operation of
inquiry excludes any element of practical activity that enters
into the construction of the object known. Strangely enough,
this is as true of idealism as of realism, of theories of synthetic
activity as of those of passive receptivity. For according to them
"mind" constructs the known object not in any observable way,
26 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
or by means of practical overt acts having a temporal quality,
but by some occult internal operation.
The common essence of all these theories, in short, is that
what is known is antecedent to the mental act of observation
and inquiry, and is totally unaffected by these acts; otherwise it
would not be fixed and unchangeable. This negative condition,
that the processes of search, investigation, reflection, involved
in knowledge relate to something having prior being, fixes once
for all the main characters attributed to mind, and to the organs
of knowing. They must be outside what is known, so as not to
interact in any way with the object to be known. If the word
"interaction" be used, it cannot denote that overt production of
change it signifies in its ordinary and practical use.
The theory of knowing is modelled after what was supposed
to take place in the act of vision. The object refracts light
to the eye and is seen ; it makes a difference to the eye and to
the person having an optical apparatus, but none to the thing
seen. The real object is the object so fixed in its regal aloofness
that it is a king to any beholding mind that may gaze upon it.
A spectator theory of knowledge is the inevitable outcome.
There have been theories which hold that mental activity inter-
venes, but they have retained the old premise. They have there-
fore concluded that it is impossible to know reality. Since mind
intervenes, we know, according to them, only some modified
semblance of the real object, some "appearance". It would be
hard to find a more thoroughgoing confirmation than this con-
clusion provides of the complete hold possessed by the belief
that the object of knowledge is a reality fixed and complete in
itself, in isolation from an act of inquiry which has in it any
element of production of change.
All of these notions about certainty and the fixed, about
the nature of the real world, about the nature of the mind and
its organs of knowing, are completely bound up with one
another, and their consequences ramify into practically all im-
portant ideas entertained upon any philosophic question. They
ESCAPE FROM PERIL 27
all flow such is my basic thesis from the separation (set up
in the interest of the quest for absolute certainty) between
theory and practice, knowledge and actions. Consequently the
later problem cannot be attacked in isolation, by itself. It is too
thoroughly entangled with fundamental beliefs and ideas in
all sorts of fields.
In later chapters the theme will, therefore, be approached in
relation to each of the above-mentioned points. We shall first
take up the effect of the traditional separation upon the concep-
tion of the nature of philosophy, especially in connection with
the question of the secure place of values in existence. We shall
then pass on to an account of the way in which modern philo-
sophies have been dominated by the problem of reconciling the
conclusions of natural science with the objective validity of the
values by which men live and regulate their conduct: a
problem which would have no existence were it not for the
prior uncritical acceptance of the traditional notion that know-
ledge has a monopolistic claim to access to reality. The dis-
cussion will then take up various phases of the development of
actual knowing as exemplified in scientific procedure, so as to
show, by an analysis of experimental inquiry in its various
phases, how completely the traditional assumptions, mentioned
above, have been abandoned in concrete scientific procedure.
For science in becoming experimental has itself become a mode
of directed practical doing. There will then follow a brief state-
ment of the effect of the destruction of the barriers which have
divided theory and practice upon reconstruction of the basic
ideas about mind and thought, and upon the solution of a
number of long-standing problems as to the theory of know-
ledge. The consequences of substituting search for security by
practical means for quest of absolute certainty by cognitive
means will then be considered in its bearing upon the problem
of our judgments regarding the values which control conduct,
especially its social phases.
CHAPTER II
PHILOSOPHY'S SEARCH FOR THE IMMUTABLE
IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER, we noted incidentally the distinction
made in the classic tradition between knowledge and belief, or,
as Locke put it, between knowledge and judgment. According
to this distinction the certain and knowledge are co-extensive.
Disputes exist, but they are whether sensation or reason affords
the basis of certainty; or whether existence or essence is its
object. In contrast with this identification, the very word
" belief" is eloquent on the topic of certainty. We believe in the
absence of knowledge or complete assurance. Hence the quest
for certainty has always been an effort to transcend belief. Now
since, as we have already noted, all matters of practical action
involve an element of uncertainty, we can ascend from belief
to knowledge only by isolating the latter from practical doing
and making.
In this chapter we are especially concerned with the effect
of the ideal of certainty as something superior to belief upon
the conception of the nature and function of philosophy. Greek
thinkers saw clearly and logically that experience cannot
furnish us, as respects cognition of existence, with anything
more than contingent probability. Experience cannot deliver to
us necessary truths; truths completely demonstrated by reason.
Its conclusions are particular, not universal. Not being " exact"
they come short of "science". Thus there arose the dis-
tinction between rational truths or, in modern terminology,
truths relating to the relation of ideas, and "truths" about
matters of existence, empirically ascertained. Thus not merely
the arts of practice, industrial and social, were stamped
matters of belief rather than of knowledge, but also all
those sciences which are matters of inductive inference from
observation.
- One might indulge in the reflection that they are none the
PHILOSOPHY'S SEARCH FOR THE IMMUTABLE 29
worse for all that, especially since the natural sciences have
developed a technique for achieving a high degree of prob-
ability and for measuring, within assignable limits, the amount
of probability which attaches in particular cases to conclusions.
But historically the matter is not so simple as to permit of this
retort. For empirical or observational sciences were placed in
invidious contrast to rational sciences which dealt with eternal
and universal objects and which therefore were possessed of
necessary truth. Consequently all observational sciences as far
as their material could not be subsumed under forms and prin-
ciples supplied by rational science shared in the depreciatory
view held about practical affairs. They are relatively low,
secular and profane compared with the perfect realities of
rational science.
And here is a justification for going back to something as
remote in time as Greek philosophy. The whole classic tradi-
tion down to our day has continued to hold a slighting view of
experience as such, and to hold up as the proper goal and ideal
of true knowledge realities which even if they are located in
empirical things cannot be known by experimental methods.
The logical consequence for philosophy itself is evident. Upon
the side of method, it has been compelled to claim for itself the
possession of a method issuing from reason itself, and having
the warrant of reason, independently of experience. As long as
the view obtained that nature itself is truly known by the same
rational method, the consequences at least those which were
evident were not serious. There was no break between
philosophy and genuine science or what was conceived to be
such. In fact, there was not even a distinction; there were
simply various branches of philosophy, metaphysical, logical,
natural, moral, etc., in a descending scale of demonstrative cer-
tainty. Since, according to the theory, the subject-matter of the
lower sciences was inherently of a different character from that
of true knowledge, there was no ground for rational dissatis-
faction with the lower degree of knowledge called belief.
3 o THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
Inferior knowledge or belief corresponded to the inferior state
of subject-matter.
The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century effected
a great modification. Science itself through the aid of mathe-
matics carried the scheme of demonstrative knowledge over to
natural objects. The "laws" of the natural world had that
fixed character which in the older scheme had belonged only to
rational and ideal forms. A mathematical science of nature
couched in mechanistic terms claimed to be the only sound
natural philosophy. Hence the older philosophies lost alliance
with natural knowledge and the support that had been given
to philosophy by them. Philosophy in maintaining its claim to
be a superior form of knowledge was compelled to take an
invidious and so to say malicious attitude toward the conclusions
of natural science. The framework of the old tradition had in
the meantime become embedded in Christian theology, and
through religious teaching was made a part of the inherited
culture of those innocent of any technical philosophy. Conse-
quently, the rivalry between philosophy and the new science,
with respect to the claim to know reality, was converted in effect
into a rivalry between the spiritual values guaranteed by the
older philosophic tradition and the conclusions of natural
knowledge. The more science advanced the more it seemed to
encroach upon the special province of the territory over which
philosophy had claimed jurisdiction. Thus philosophy in its
classic form became a species of apologetic justification for
belief in an ultimate reality in which the values which should
regulate life and control conduct are securely enstated.
There are undoubted disadvantages in the historic manner
of approach to the problem which has been followed. It may
readily be thought either that the Greek formulation which
has been emphasized has no especial pertinency with respect
to modern thought and especially to contemporary philosophy ;
or that no philosophical statement is of any great importance
for the mass of non-philosophic persons. Those interested in
PHILOSOPHY'S SEARCH FOR THE IMMUTABLE 31
philosophy may object that the criticisms passed are directed
if not at a man of straw at least to positions that have long
since lost their actuality. Those not friendly to any form of
philosophy may inquire what import they have for any except
professed philosophers.
The first type of objection will be dealt with somewhat in
extenso in the succeeding chapter, in which I shall try to show
how modern philosophies, in spite of their great diversity, have
been concerned with problems of adjustment of the conclusions
of modern science to the chief religious and moral tradition
of the western world; together with the way in which these
problems are connected with retention of the conception of the
relation of knowledge to reality formulated in Greek thought.
At the point in the discussion now reached, it suffices to point
out that, in spite of great changes in detail, the notion of a
separation between knowledge and action, theory and practice,
has been perpetuated, and that the beliefs connected with action
are taken to be uncertain and inferior in value compared with
those inherently connected with objects of knowledge, so that
the former are securely established only as they derived from
the latter. Not the specific content of Greek thought is pertinent
to present problems, but its insistence that security is measured
by certainty of knowledge, while the latter is measured by
adhesion to fixed and immutable objects, which therefore are
independent of what men do in practical activity.
The other objection is of a different sort. It comes from
those who feel that not merely Greek philosophy but philosophy
in any form is remote from all significant human concern. It
is willing to admit or rather assert that it is presumptuous for
philosophy to lay claim to knowledge of a higher order than
that given by natural science, but it also holds that this
is no great matter in any case except for professional philo-
sophers.
There would be force in this latter objection were it not
that those who make it hold for the most part the same
32 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
philosophy of certainty and its proper object that is held by
philosophers, save in an inchoate form. They are not interested
in the notion that philosophic thought is a special means of
attaining this object and the certainty it affords, but they are
far from holding, either explicitly or implicitly, that the arts
of intelligently directed action are the means by which security
of values is to be attained. With respect to certain ends and
goods they accept this idea. But in thinking of these ends and
values as material, as related to health, wealth, control of con-
ditions for the sake of an inferior order of consequences, they
retain the same division between a higher reality and a lower
that is formulated in classic philosophy. They may be innocent
of the vocabulary that speaks of reason, necessary truth, the
universal, things in themselves and appearances. But they
incline to believe that there is some other road than that of
action, directed by knowledge, to achieve ultimate security of
higher ideals and purposes. They think of practical action as
necessary for practical utilities, but they mark off practical
utilities from spiritual and ideal values. Philosophy did not
originate the underlying division. It only gave intellectual
formulation and justification to ideas that were operative in
men's minds generally. And the elements of these ideas are
as active in present culture as they ever were in the past. In-
deed, through the diffusion of religious doctrines, the idea
that ultimate values are a matter of special revelation and are
to be embodied in life by special means radically different from
the arts of action that deal with lower and lesser ends has been
accentuated in the popular mind.
Here is the point which is of general human import instead
of concern merely to professional philosophers. What about
the security of values, of the things which are admirable,
honourable, to be approved of and striven for? It is probably
in consequence of the derogatory view held of practice that
the question of the secure place of values in human experience
is so seldom raised in connection with the problem of the
PHILOSOPHY'S SEARCH FOR THE IMMUTABLE 33
relation of knowledge and practice. But upon any view con-
cerning the status of action, the scope of the latter cannot be
restricted to self-seeking acts, nor to those of a prudential
aspect, nor in general to things of expediency and what
are often termed "utilitarian" affairs. The maintenance and
diffusion of intellectual values, of moral excellencies, the
aesthetically admirable, as well as the maintenance of order
and decorum in human relations are dependent upon what
men do.
Whether because of the emphasis of traditional religion
upon salvation of the personal soul or for some other reason,
there is a tendency to restrict the ultimate scope of morals to
the reflex effect of conduct on one's self. Even utilitarianism,
with all its seeming independence of traditional theology and
its emphasis upon the general good as the criterion for judging
conduct, insisted in its hedonistic psychology upon private
pleasure as the motive for action. The idea that the stable and
expanding institution of all things that make life worth while
throughout all human relationships is the real object of all
intelligent conduct is depressed from view by the current con-
ception of morals as a special kind of action chiefly concerned
with either the virtues or the enjoyments of individuals in their
personal capacities. In changed form, we still retain the notion
of a division of activity into two kinds having very different
worths. The result is the depreciated meaning that has come
to be attached to the very meaning of the "practical" and the
useful. Instead of being extended to cover all forms of action
by means of which all the values of life are extended and
rendered more secure, including the diffusion of the fine arts
and the cultivation of taste, the processes of education and all
activities which are concerned with rendering human relation-
ships more significant and worthy, the meaning of "practical"
is limited to matters of ease, comfort, riches, bodily security
and police order, possibly health, etc., things which in their
isolation from other goods can only lay claim to restricted and
c
34 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
narrow value. In consequence, these subjects are handed over
to technical sciences and arts; they are no concern of "higher"
interests which feel that no matter what happens to inferior
goods in the vicissitudes of natural existence, the highest values
are immutable characters of the ultimately real.
Our depreciatory attitude toward "practice" would be modi-
fied if we habitually thought of it in its most liberal sense, and
if we surrendered our customary dualism between two separate
kinds of value, one intrinsically higher and one inherently
lower. We should regard practice as the only means (other
than accident) by which whatever is judged to be honourable,
admirable, approvable can be kept in concrete experienceable
existence. In this connection the entire import of "morals"
would be transformed. How much of the tendency to ignore
permanent objective consequences in differences made in
natural and social relations; and how much of the emphasis
upon personal and internal motives and dispositions irrespective
of what they objectively produce and sustain, are products of
the habitual depreciation of the worth of action in com-
parison with forms of mental processes, of thought and
sentiment, which make no objective difference in things them-
selves ?
It would be possible to argue (and, I think, with much
justice) that failure to make action central in the search for
such security as is humanly possible is a survival of the
impotency of man in those stages of civilization when he had
few means of regulating and utilizing the conditions upon
which the occurrence of consequences depend. As long as man
was unable by means of the arts of practice to direct the course
of events, it was natural for him to seek an emotional substitute
in the absence of actual certainty in the midst of a precarious
and hazardous world, men cultivated all sorts of things that
would give them the feeling of certainty. And it is possible
that, when not carried to an illusory point, the cultivation of
the feeling gave man courage and confidence and enabled him
PHILOSOPHY'S SEARCH FOR THE IMMUTABLE 35
to carry the burdens of life mere successfully. But one could
hardly seriously contend that this fact, if it be such, is one
upon which to found a reasoned philosophy.
It is to the conception of philosophy that we come back.
No mode of action can, as we have insisted, give anything
approaching absolute certitude ; it provides insurance but no
assurance. Doing is always subject to peril, to the danger of
frustration. When men began to reflect philosophically it
seemed to them altogether too risky to leave the place of
values at the mercy of acts the results of which are never sure.
This precariousness might hold as far as empirical existence,
existence in the sensible and phenomenal world, is concerned ;
but this very uncertainty seemed to render it the more needful
that ideal goods should be shown to have, by means of know-
ledge of the most assured type, an indefeasible and inex-
pugnable position in the realm of the ultimately real. So at
least we may imagine men to have reasoned. And to-day many
persons find a peculiar consolation in the face of the unstable
and dubious presence of values in actual experience by project-
ing a perfect form of good into a realm of essence, if not into
a heaven beyond the earthly skies, wherein their authority, if
not their existence, is wholly unshakeable.
Instead of asking how far this process is of that compensa-
tory kind with which recent psychology has made us familiar,
we are inquiring into the effect upon philosophy. It will not be
denied, I suppose, that the chief aim of those philosophies
which I have called classical has been to show that the realities
which are the objects of the highest and most necessary know-
ledge are also endowed with the values which correspond to our
best aspirations, admirations and approvals. That, one may say,
is the very heart of all traditional philosophic idealisms. There
is a pathos, having its own nobility, in philosophies which think
it their proper office to give an intellectual or cognitive certifi-
cation to the ontological reality of the highest values. It is
difficult for men to see desire and choice set earnestly upon
36 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
the good and yet being frustrated, without their imagining a
realm in which the good has come completely to its own, and
is identified with a Reality in which resides all ultimate power.
The failure and frustration of actual life is then attributed
to the fact that this world is finite and phenomenal, sensible
rather than real, or to the weakness of our finite apprehension,
which cannot see that the discrepancy between existence and
value is merely seeming, and that a fuller vision would behold
partial evil an element in complete good. Thus the office of
philosophy is to project by dialectic, resting supposedly upon
self-evident premises, a realm in which the object of com-
pletest cognitive certitude is also one with the object of the
heart's best aspiration. The fusion of the good and the true
with unity and plenitude of Being thus becomes the goal of
classic philosophy.
The situation would strike us as a curious one were it not
so familiar. Practical activity is dismissed to a world of low-
grade reality. Desire is found only where something is lacking
and hence its existence is a sign of imperfection of Being. Hence
one must go to passionless reason to find perfect reality and
complete certitude. But nevertheless the chief philosophic
interest is to prove that the essential properties of the reality
that is the object of pure knowledge are precisely those charac-
teristics which have meaning in connection with affection,
desire and choice. After degrading practical affairs in order
to exalt knowledge, the chief task of knowledge turns out to
be to demonstrate the absolutely assured and permanent reality
of the values with which practical activity is concerned ! Can
we fail to see the irony in a situation wherein desire and emotion
are relegated to a position inferior in every way to that of
knowledge, while at the same time the chief problem of that
which is termed the highest and most perfect knowledge is
taken to be the existence of evil that is, of desires errant and
frustrated ?
The contradiction involved, however, is much more than a
PHILOSOPHY'S SEARCH FOR THE IMMUTABLE 37
purely intellectual one which if purely theoretical would be
innocuously lacking in practical consequences. The thing which
concerns all of us as human beings is precisely the greatest
attainable security of values in concrete existence. The thought
that the values which are unstable and wavering in the world
in which we live are eternally secure in a higher realm (which
reason demonstrates but which we cannot experience), that all
the goods which are defeated here are triumphant there, may
give consolation to the depressed. But it does not change the
existential situation in the least. The separation that has been
instituted between theory and practice, with its consequent
substitution of cognitive quest for absolute assurance for prac-
tical endeavour to make the existence of good more secure in
experience, has had the effect of distracting attention and
diverting energy from a task whose performance would yield
definite results.
The chief consideration in achieving concrete security of
values lies in the perfecting of methods of action. Mere activity
blind striving, gets nothing forward. Regulation of conditions
upon which results depend is possible only by doing, yet
only by doing which has intelligent direction, which takes
cognizance of conditions, observes relations of sequence, and
which plans and executes in the light of this knowledge. The
notion that thought, apart from action, can warrant complete
certitude as to the status of supreme good, makes no contri-
bution to the central problem of development of intelligent
methods of regulation. It rather depresses and deadens effort
in that direction. That is the chief indictment to be brought
against the classic philosophic tradition. Its import raises the
question of the relation which action sustains to knowledge in
fact, and whether the quest for certainty by other means than
those of intelligent action does not mark a baneful diversion
of thought from its proper office. It raises the question whether
mankind has not now achieved a sufficient degree of control
of methods of knowing and of the arts of practical action so
38 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
that a radical change in our conceptions of knowledge and
practice is rendered both possible and necessary.
That knowing, as judged from the actual procedures of
scientific inquiry, has completely abandoned in fact the tradi-
tional separation of knowing and doing, that the experimental
procedure is one that installs doing as the heart of knowing,
is a theme that will occupy our attention in later chapters.
What would happen to philosophy if it wholeheartedly made
a similar surrender? What would be its office if it ceased
to deal with the problem of reality and knowledge at large?
In effect, its function would be to facilitate the fruitful
interaction of our cognitive beliefs, our beliefs resting upon
the most dependable methods of inquiry, with our practical
beliefs about the values, the ends and purposes, that should
control human action in the things of large and liberal human
import.
Such a view renounces the traditional notion that action is
inherently inferior to knowledge and preference for the fixed
over the changing; it involves the conviction that security
attained by active control is to be more prized than certainty
in theory. But it does not imply that action is higher and better
than knowledge, and practice inherently superior to thought.
Constant and effective interaction of knowledge and practice
is something quite different from an exaltation of activity for
its own sake. Action, when directed by knowledge, is method
and means, not an end. The aim and end is the securer, freer
and more widely shared embodiment of values in experience by
means of that active control of objects which knowledge alone
makes possible. 1
From this point of view, the problem of philosophy con-
cerns the interaction of our judgments about ends to be sought
1 In reaction against the age-long depreciation of practice in behalf
of contemplative knowledge, there is a temptation simply to turn
things upside down. But the essence of pragmatic instrumentalism is to
conceive of both knowledge and practice as means of making goods
PHILOSOPHY'S SEARCH FOR THE IMMUTABLE 39
with knowledge of the means for achieving them. Just as in
science the question of the advance of knowledge is the question
of what to do, what experiments to perform, what apparatus to
invent and use, what calculations to engage in, what branches
of mathematics to employ or to perfect, so the problem of
practice is what do we need to know, how shall we obtain that
knowledge and how shall we apply it ?
It is an easy and altogether too common a habit to confuse
a personal division of labour with an isolation of function and
meaning. Human beings as individuals tend to devote them-
selves either to the practice of knowing or to the practice of
a professional, business, social or aesthetic art. Each takes the
other half of the circle for granted. Theorists and practitioners,
however, often indulge in unseemly wrangles as to the im-
portance of their respective tasks. Then the personal difference
of callings is hypostatized and made into an intrinsic differ-
ence between knowledge and practice.
If one looks at the history of knowledge, it is plain that at
the beginning men tried to know because they had to do so in
order to live. In the absence of that organic guidance given by
their structure to other animals, man had to find out what
he was about, and he could find out only by studying the
environment which constituted the means, obstacles and results
of his behaviour. The desire for intellectual or cognitive under-
standing had no meaning except as a means of obtaining greater
security as to the issues of action. Moreover, even when after
the coming of leisure some men were enabled to adopt know-
ing as their special calling or profession, merely theoretical
uncertainty continues to have no meaning.
This statement will arouse protest. But the reaction against
the statement will turn out when examined to be due to the
fact that it is so difficult to find a case of purely intellectual
uncertainty, that is one upon which nothing hangs. Perhaps
as near to it as we can come is in the familiar story of the
Oriental potentate who declined to attend a horse-race on the
40 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
ground that it was already well known to him that one horse
could run faster than another. His uncertainty as to which of
several horses could outspeed the others may be said to have
been purely intellectual. But also in the story nothing depended
from it ; no curiosity was aroused ; no effort was put forth to
satisfy the uncertainty. In other words, he did not care; it
made no difference. And it is a strict truism that no one would
care about any exclusively theoretical uncertainty or certainty.
For by definition in being exclusively theoretical it is one which
makes no difference anywhere.
Revulsion against this proposition is a tribute to the fact
that actually the intellectual and the practical are so closely
bound together. Hence when we imagine we are thinking of
an exclusively theoretical doubt, we smuggle in unconsciously
some consequence which hangs upon it. We think of uncertainty
arising in the course of an inquiry; in this case, uncertainty
until it is resolved blocks the progress of the inquiry a dis-
tinctly practical affair, since it involves conclusions and the
means of producing them. If we had no desires and no pur-
poses, then, as sheer truism, one state of things would be as
good as any other. Those who have set such store by the
demonstration that Absolute Being already contains in eternal
safety within itself all values, have had as their interest the
fact that while the demonstration would make no difference
in the concrete existence of these values unless perhaps to
weaken effort to generate and sustain them it would make
a difference in their own personal attitudes in a feeling of
comfort or of release from responsibility, the consciousness of
a "moral holiday" in which some philosophers have found the
distinction between morals and religion.
Such considerations point to the conclusion that the ulti-
mate ground of the quest for cognitive certainty is the need for
security in the results of action. Men readily persuade them-
selves that they are devoted to intellectual certainty for its own
sake. Actually they want it because of its bearing on safeguard-
PHILOSOPHY'S SEARCH FOR THE IMMUTABLE 41
ing what they desire and esteem. The need for protection and
prosperity in action created the need for warranting the validity
of intellectual beliefs.
After a distinctively intellectual class had arisen, a class
having leisure and in a large degree protected against the more
serious perils which afflict the mass of humanity, its members
proceeded to glorify their own office. Since no amount of pains
and care in action can ensure complete certainty, certainty in
knowledge was worshipped as a substitute. In minor matters,
those that are relatively technical, professional, "utilitarian",
men continued to resort to improving their methods of opera-
tion in order to be surer of results. But in affairs of momentous
value the requisite knowledge is hard to come by and the
bettering of methods is a slow process to be realized only by
the co-operative endeavour of many persons. The arts to be
formed and developed are social arts ; an individual by himself
can do little to regulate the conditions which will render im-
portant values more secure, though with shrewdness and special
knowledge he can do much to further his own peculiar aims
given a fair share of luck. So because of impatience and
because, as Aristotle was given to pointing out, an individual
is self-sufficient in that kind of thinking which involves no
action, the ideal of a cognitive certainty and truth having no
connection with practice, and prized because of its lack of con-
nection, developed. The doctrine worked out practically so as
to strengthen dependence upon authority and dogma in the
things of highest value, while increase of specialized know-
ledge was relied upon in everyday, especially economic, affairs.
Just as belief that a magical ceremony will regulate the growth
of seeds to full harvest stifles the tendency to investigate
natural causes and their workings, so acceptance of dogmatic
rules as bases of conduct in education, morals and social
matters, lessens the impetus to find out about the conditions
which are involved in forming intelligent plans.
It is more or less of a commonplace to speak of the crisis
42 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
which has been caused by the progress of the natural sciences
in the last few centuries. The crisis is due, it is asserted, to the
incompatibility between the conclusions of natural science about
the world in which we live and the realm of higher values,
of ideal and spiritual qualities, which get no support from
natural science. The new science, it is said, has stripped the
world of the qualities which made it beautiful and congenial to
men ; has deprived nature of all aspiration towards ends, all
preference for accomplishing the good, and presented nature to
us as a scene of indifferent physical particles acting according
to mathematical and mechanical laws.
This effect of modern science has, it is notorious, set the
main problems for modern philosophy. How is science to be
accepted and yet the realm of values to be conserved ? This
question forms the philosophic version of the popular conflict
of science and religion. Instead of being troubled about the
inconsistency of astronomy with the older religious beliefs
about heaven and the ascension of Christ, or the differences
between the geological record and the account of creation in
Genesis, philosophers have been troubled by the gap in kind
which exists between the fundamental principles of the natural
world and the reality of the values according to which mankind
is to regulate its life.
Philosophers, therefore, set to work to mediate, to find
some harmony behind the apparent discord. Everybody knows
that the trend of modern philosophy has been to arrive at
theories regarding the nature of the universe by means of
theories regarding the nature of knowledge a procedure
which reverses the apparently more judicious method of the
ancients in basing their conclusions about knowledge on the
nature of the universe in which knowledge occurs. The "crisis"
of which we have just been speaking accounts for the reversal.
Since science has made the trouble, the cure ought to be
found in an examination of the nature of knowledge, of the
conditions which make science possible. If the conditions of
PHILOSOPHY'S SEARCH FOR THE IMMUTABLE 43
the possibility of knowledge can be shown to be of an ideal
and rational character, then, so it has been thought, the loss
of an idealistic cosmology in physics can be readily borne. The
physical world can be surrendered to matter and mechanism,
since we are assured that matter and mechanism have their
foundation in immaterial mind. Such has been the characteristic
course of modern spiritualistic philosophies since the time of
Kant; indeed, since that of Descartes, who first felt the poign-
ancy of the problem involved in reconciling the conclusions of
science with traditional religious and moral beliefs.
It would presumably be taken as a sign of extreme naivet^,
if not of callous insensitiveness, if one were to ask why all this
ardour to reconcile the findings of natural science with the
validity of values? Why should any increase of knowledge
seem like a threat to what we prize, admire and approve? Why
should we not proceed to employ our gains in science to im-
prove our judgments about values, and to regulate our actions
so as to make values more secure and more widely shared in
existence ?
I am willing to run the risk of charge of naivete for the
sake of making manifest the difference upon which we have
been dwelling. If men had associated their ideas about values
with practical activity instead of with cognition of antecedent
Being, they would not have been troubled by the findings of
science. They would have welcomed the latter. For anything
ascertained about the structure of actually existing conditions
would be a definite aid in making judgments about things to
be prized and striven for more adequate, and would instruct
us as to the means to be employed in realizing them. But
according to the religious and philosophic tradition of Europe,
the valid status of all the highest values, the good, true and
beautiful, was bound up with their being properties of ultimate
and supreme Being, namely, God. All went well as long as
what passed for natural science gave no offence to this concep-
tion. Trouble began when science ceased to disclose in the
44 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
objects of knowledge the possession of any such properties.
Then some roundabout method had to be devised for sub-
stantiating them.
The point of the seemingly crass question which was asked
is thus to elicit the radical difference made when the problem
of values is seen to be connected with the problem of intelli-
gent action. If the validity of beliefs and judgments about
values is dependent upon the consequences of action undertaken
in their behalf, if the assumed association of values with know-
ledge capable of being demonstrated apart from activity is
abandoned, then the problem of the intrinsic relation of science
to value is wholly artificial. It is replaced by a group of prac-
tical problems : How shall we employ what we know to direct
the formation of our beliefs about value and how shall we
direct our practical behaviour so as to test these beliefs and
make possible better ones? The question is seen to be just
what it has always been empirically: What shall we do to
make objects having value more secure in existence? And we
approach the answer to the problem with all the advantages
given us by increase of knowledge of the conditions and
relations under which this doing must proceed.
But for over two thousand years the weight of the most
influential and authoritatively orthodox tradition of thought
has been thrown into the opposite scale. It has been devoted
to the problem of a purely cognitive certification (perhaps by
revelation, perhaps by intuition, perhaps by reason) of the
antecedent immutable reality of truth, beauty and goodness.
As against such a doctrine, the conclusions of natural science
constitute the materials of a serious problem. The appeal has
been made to the Court of Knowledge and the verdict has
been adverse. There are two rival systems that must have their
respective claims adjusted. The crisis in contemporary culture,
the confusions and conflicts in it, arise from a division of
authority. Scientific inquiry seems to tell one thing, and tra-
ditional beliefs about ends and ideals that have authority over
PHILOSOPHY'S SEARCH FOR THE IMMUTABLE 45
conduct tell us something quite different. The problem of
reconciliation arises and persists for one reason only. As long
as the notions persist that knowledge is a disclosure of reality,
of reality prior to and independent of knowing, and that know-
ing is independent of a purpose to control the quality of
experienced objects, the failure of natural science to disclose
significant values in its objects will come as a shock. Those
seriously concerned with the validity and authority of value
will have a problem on their hands. As long as the notion per-
sists that values are authentic and valid only on condition that
they are properties of Being independent of human action,
as long as it is supposed that their right to regulate action is
dependent upon their being independent of action, so long
there will be needed schemes to prove that values are, in
spite of the findings of science, genuine and known qualifica-
tions of reality in itself. For men will not easily surrender
all regulative guidance in action. If they are forbidden to find
standards in the course of experience they will seek them some-
where else, if not in revelation, then in the deliverance of a
reason that is above experience.
This then is the fundamental issue for present philosophy.
Is the doctrine justified that knowledge is valid in the degree
in which it is a revelation of antecedent existences or Being?
Is the doctrine justified that regulative ends and purposes have
validity only when they can be shown to be properties belong-
ing to things, whether as existences or as essences, apart from
human action? It is proposed to make another start. Desires,
affections, preferences, needs and interests at least exist in
human experience; they are characteristics of it. Knowledge
about nature also exists. What does this knowledge imply and
entail with respect to the guidance of our emotional and
volitional life ? How shall the latter lay hold of what is known
in order to make it of service ?
These latter questions do not seem to many thinkers to
have the dignity that is attached to the traditional problems of
46 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
philosophy. They are proximate questions, not ultimate. They
do not concern Being and Knowledge "in themselves" and at
large, but the state of existence at specified times and places
and the state of affection, plans and purposes under concrete
circumstances. They are not concerned with framing a general
theory of reality, knowledge and value once for all, but with
finding how authentic beliefs about existence as they currently
exist can operate fruitfully and efficaciously in connection with
the practical problems that are urgent in actual life.
In restricted and technical fields, men now proceed un-
hesitatingly along these lines. In technology and the arts of
engineering and medicine, men do not think of operating in
any other way. Increased knowledge of nature and its con-
ditions does not raise the problem of validity of the value of
health or of communication in general, although it may well
make dubious the validity of certain conceptions men in the
past have entertained about the nature of health and com-
munication and the best ways of attaining these goods in fact.
In such matters, science has placed in our hands the means
by which we can better judge our wants, and has aided in form-
ing the instruments and operations by which to satisfy them.
That the same sort of thing has not happened in the moral
and distinctly humane arts is evident. Here is a problem which
might well trouble philosophers.
Why have not the arts which deal with the wider, more
generous, more distinctly humane values enjoyed the release
and expansion which have accrued to the technical arts? Can
it be seriously urged that it is because natural science has dis-
closed to us the kind of world which it has disclosed? It is
easy to see that these disclosures are hostile to some beliefs
about values which have been widely accepted, which have
prestige, which have become deeply impregnated with senti-
ment, and which authoritative institutions as well as the
emotion and inertia of men are slow to surrender. But this ad-
mission, which practically enforces itself, is far from excluding
PHILOSOPHY'S SEARCH FOR THE IMMUTABLE 47
the formation of new beliefs about things to be honoured
and prized by men in their supreme loyalties of action. The
difficulty in the road is a practical one, a social one, connected
with institutions and the methods and aims of education, not
with science nor with value. Under such circumstances the first
problem for philosophy would seem to be to clear itself -of
further responsibility for the doctrine that the supreme issue
is whether values have antecedent Being, while its further
office is to make clear the revisions and reconstructions that
have to be made in traditional judgments about values. Having
done this, it would be in a position to undertake the more
positive task of projecting ideas about values which might be
the basis of a new integration of human conduct.
We come back to the fact that the genuine issue is not
whether certain values, associated with traditions and institu-
tions, have Being already (whether that of existence or of
essence), but what concrete judgments we are to form about
ends and means in the regulation of practical behaviour. The
emphasis which has been put upon the former question, the
creation of dogmas about the way in which values are already
real independently of what we do, dogmas which have appealed
not in vain to philosophy for support, have naturally bred,
in the face of the changed character of science, confusion,
irresolution and numbness of will. If men had been educated
to think about broader humane values as they have now
learned to think about matters which fall within the scope of
technical arts, our whole present situation would be very
different. The attention which has gone to achieving a purely
theoretical certainty with respect to them would have been
devoted to perfecting the arts by which they are to be judged
and striven for.
Indulge for a moment in an imaginative flight. Suppose
that men had been systematically educated in the belief that
the existence of values can cease to be accidental, narrow and
precarious only by human activity directed by the best available
48 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
knowledge. Suppose also men had been systematically educated
to believe that the important thing is not to get themselves
personally "right" in relation to the antecedent author and
guarantor of these values, but to form their judgments and
carry on their activity on the basis of public, objective and
shared consequences. Imagine these things and then imagine
what the present situation might be.
The suppositions are speculative. But they serve to indicate
the significance of the one point to which this chapter is
devoted. The method and conclusions of science have without
doubt invaded many cherished beliefs about the things held
most dear. The resulting clash constitutes a genuine cultural
crisis. But it is a crisis in culture, a social crisis, historical and
temporal in character. It is not a problem in the adjustment of
properties of reality to one another. And yet modern philo-
sophy has chosen for the most part to treat it as a question of
how the realities assumed to be the object of science can have
the mathematical and mechanistic properties assigned to them
in natural science, while nevertheless the realm of ultimate
reality can be characterized by qualities termed ideal and
spiritual. The cultural problem is one of definite criticisms to
be made and of readjustments to be accomplished. Philosophy
which is willing to abandon its supposed task of knowing
ultimate reality and to devote itself to a proximate human
office might be of great help in such a task. It may be doubted
whether it can indefinitely pursue the task of trying to show
that the results of science when they are properly interpreted
do not mean what they seem to say, or of proving, by means
of an examination of possibilities and limits of knowledge, that
after all they rest upon a foundation congruous with traditional
beliefs about values.
Since the root of the traditional conception of philosophy
is the separation that has been made between knowledge and
action, between theory and practice, it is to the problem of this
separation that we are to give attention. Our main attempt
PHILOSOPHY'S SEARCH FOR THE IMMUTABLE 49
will be to show how the actual procedures of knowledge,
interpreted after the pattern formed by experimental inquiry,
cancel the isolation of knowledge from overt action. Before
engaging in this attempt, we shall in the next chapter show
the extent to which modern philosophy has been dominated
by effort to adjust to each other two systems of belief, one
relating to the objects of knowledge and the other to objects
of ideal value.
CHAPTER III
CONFLICT OF AUTHORITIES
IT is THE THEME of the present chapter that modern philosophy,
understanding by this term that which has been influenced
by the rise of the newer natural science, has contained within
itself an inner division. It has tried to combine acceptance of
the conclusions of scientific inquiry as to the natural world
with acceptance of doctrines about the nature of mind and
knowledge which originated before there was such a thing as
systematic experimental inquiry. Between the two there is an
inherent incompatibility. Hence the best efforts of philosophy
have been constantly frustrated by artificiality and by contro-
versial conflicts. Of all the many artificial problems which
philosophy has thereby inflicted upon itself, we are here con-
cerned with but one, the one with which the last chapter was
concerned in a general way. This is the supposed need of
reconciling, of somehow adjusting, the findings of scientific
knowledge with the validity of ideas concerning value.
For obvious reasons, Greek thought, from which stem
the philosophic conceptions about the nature of knowledge as
the sole valid grasp or vision of reality, did not have this
problem. Its physics were in complete harmony with its meta-
physics, and the latter were teleological and qualitative. Natural
objects themselves tend, throughout their changes, toward ideal
ends that are the final objects of highest knowledge. A science
of natural changes is possible only because of this fact. The
natural world is knowable in as far as its changes are dominated
by forms or essences that are immutable, complete or perfect.
In aspiring to actualize these prior and perfect forms, natural
phenomena present characters in virtue of which they may be
known, that is, defined and classified. Moreover, these ideal
forms form reason in its full and perfect actuality of Being.
To know them is to enjoy communion with perfect Being: and
CONFLICT OF AUTHORITIES 51
thus to enjoy the highest happiness. For man as a rational and
yet natural being strives also to realize his end, and this reali-
zation is identical with apprehension of true and immutable
Being. In this apprehension, man rises above the mutabilities
of the natural world and comes into possession of a perfection
which is incapable of lack and deprivation. Pure rationality is
in its purity above physical nature. But in his essential being,
his rationality, man is himself above nature. The reality which
satisfies the quest for cognitive certitude thus also affords the
unqualified possession of perfect good.
vThe need of adjustment of the results of knowledge and
the apprehension and enjoyment of the highest good came
when, in the seventeenth century, new methods of inquiry
gave an entirely new turn to the conceptions which could be
entertained about the natural world.
Very early in its history, modern science asserted that the
teleology of Greek science was a futile and mischievous en-
cumbrance, wholly mistaken in its idea of the goal and method
of scientific inquiry, and putting mind on the wrong trackyj It
repudiated the doctrine of ideal forms, rejecting them as
"occult". As the new scientific method progressed, it became
increasingly clear that the material of knowledge, provided one
took science as the model form of knowledge, gave no justifi-
cation for attributing to the objects of cognitive certainty
those perfections which in Greek science had been their essen-
tial properties. At the same time, there was no disposition to
break away from the tradition according to which the valid
status of values must be determined by knowledge. (Hence the
crucial problem which modern philosophy found forced upon
it, in as far as it accepted the conclusions of the new science
while it also retained three significant elements of ancient
thought: the first, that certainty, security, can be found only in
the fixed and unchanging; the second, that knowledge is the
only road to that which is intrinsically stable and certain; the
third, that practical activity is an inferior sort of thing, necessary
52 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
simply because of man's animal nature and the necessity for
winning subsistence from the environment.
In one significant respect, moreover, modern thought
started with accentuation of the gulf between the values which
are intrinsic to the real and hence are not dependent upon
action, and those goods which, being merely instrumental, are
the objects of practical activity. For Greek thought never made
a sharp separation between the rational and perfect realm and
the natural world. The latter was indeed inferior and infected
with non-being or privation. But it did not stand in any sharp
dualism to the higher and perfect reality. Greek thinking
accepted the senses, the body and nature with natural piety
and found in nature a hierarchy of forms leading degree by
degree to the divine. The soul was the realized actuality of the
body, as reason was the transcendent realization of the intima-
tion of ideal forms contained in the soul. The senses included
within themselves forms which needed only to be stripped of
their material accretions to be true stepping-stones to higher
knowledge.
Modern philosophy inherited the framework of Greek
ideas about the nature of knowledge although rejecting its
conclusions about natural objects. But it inherited them through
the medium of Hebraic and Christian religion. The natural
world in this tradition was fallen and corrupt. With the Greeks
the element of rationality was supreme and the good came
into human possession by the realized development of reason.
The intervening religious development made the ethical more
fundamental than the rational. The most significant issues con-
cerned the relation of will, rather than intellect, to supreme
and perfect Being. Thus there was effected a reversal of per-
spective as to the relations in perfect Being of the properties
in virtue of which it is respectively an object of true knowledge
and of perfect good and bliss. Righteousness, in accordance
with the Hebraic factors adopted into Christian theology, was
primary, and strictly intellectual properties were subordinate,
CONFLICT OF AUTHORITIES 53
The participation of the mind in perfect being could not be
attained by intellect until the intellect was itself morally
redeemed and purified. The difference between the pure Greek
tradition and the Christian is brought out in some words of
Cardinal Newman. "The Church holds that it were better for
sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fall, and
for all the many millions who are upon it to die of starvation
in extremest agony rather than that one soul should commit
one venial sin."
In saying that modern philosophy inherited the Greek
tradition as passed through this intervening medium of Christ-
ian thought, I do not mean to say that all features of the
Christian view of nature in relation to God and the fall of
man were taken over. On the contrary, distinctively modern
thought is marked by a revival of the Greek interest and
delight in nature and natural observation. Thinkers deeply
influenced by modern science often ceased to believe in divine
revelation as supreme authority and adhered to natural reason
in its place. Uu^the supreme place of good as a defining pro-
perty of the ultimately real remained the common premise of
Jew, Catholic and Protestant. If not vouched for by revelation,
it was warranted by the "natural light" of intellect. This phase
of the religious tradition- was so deeply ingrained in European
culture that no philosopher except the thoroughgoing sceptics
escaped its influence. In this sense modern philosophy began
its career with an accentuation of the gap which exists between
ultimate and eternal values and natural objects and goods.
Thinkers who remained within the framework of the classic
tradition held that the moral perfection which is the inherent
property of ultimate Being prescribes the law of human action.
It constitutes the norm of all significant and enduring values.
Reason is necessary to furnish the foundation of truths
without which observations or experience in general cannot
be constituted a science. But it is even more necessary to
provide for the apprehension of the ultimate and immutable
54 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
end and law of moral action. When the hierarchical ascent of
nature to mind and to ideal forms was disturbed by the con-
viction that the subject-matter of natural science is exclusively
physical and mechanistic, there arose the dualistic opposition
3f matter and spirit, of nature and ultimate ends and goods.
Qualities, excellencies and ends that were extruded from
nature by the new science found their exclusive abode and
warrant in the realm of the spiritual, which was above nature
and yet which was its source and foundation. The function of
reason in determination and enjoyment of the good no longer
formed the consummation of nature. It had a distinct and
separate office. The tension created by the opposition and yet
necessary connection of nature and spirit gave rise to all the
characteristic problems of modern philosophy. It could neither
be frankly naturalistic, nor yet fully spiritualistic to the dis-
regard of the conclusions of physical science. Since man was
on one hand a part of nature and on the other hand a member
of the realm of spirit, all problems came to a focus in his double
nature.
The philosophy of Spinoza is noteworthy for its frank
statement of this problem and for the uniquely thoroughgoing
way in which, given its terms, it was solved. An unqualified
naturalism in the sense in which he understood the new science
was combined by a miracle of logic with an equally complete
acceptance of the idea, derived from the religious tradition,
that ultimate reality is the measure of perfection and the norm
for human activity. The union thus effected is so complete as
to afford a pattern of instruction regarding the problem of
modern thought. In him, more than in any modern thinker,
there are exhibited complete loyalty to the essential element
in the Hebraic tradition ultimate and self-sufficing Being as
the standard of all human thought and action with perpetua-
tion of the Greek theory of knowledge and its exaltation of
reason over experience, together with enthusiastic adherence
to the new scientific view of nature. Thus he thought to obtain
CONFLICT OF AUTHORITIES 55
from the very heart of the new science a conclusive demonstra-
tion of the perfection of Being through which the human soul
can alone obtain absolute security and peace. A scientific com-
prehension was to give, in full reality, by rational means, that
assurance and regulation of life that non-rational religions had
pretended to give.
In his unfinished essay on the The Improvement of the
Human Understanding, he frankly states his impelling motive.
He had experienced, he says, that everything in the ordinary
course of experience is empty and futile. In desperation he set
himself to inquiring whether there is not a good capable of
communicating itself, a good so assured and complete that
the mind can adhere to it to the exclusion of all else : a good
which when found and taken possession of would give him
eternally a constant and supreme bliss. For he had discovered
that the cause of the perturbations and vanities of life was that
affection and desire were fixed upon things which perish. But
"love directed toward that which is eternal and infinite feeds
the mind wholly with joy unmixed with any sadness. . . .
The true good of man is that he should attain, together with
others if possible, to a knowledge of the union which the mind
has with Nature as a whole." He concludes, "I wish to direct
all the sciences to this one end and scope in order that we may
attain to such perfection".
Certain, enduring and unalloyed Good through the union
of mind with the whole of nature is the theme developed in
detail in the Ethics. There results a philosophy which unites
the Greek idea that man's highest good is demonstrative
rational knowledge of immutable Being; the Hebrew and Christ-
ian conviction that the soul is capable of a way of life which
secures constant and pure blessedness, and the premises and
method of the new science, as he saw the latter. Nature was
completely intelligible ; it was at one with mind ; to apprehend
nature as a whole was to attain a cognitive certainty which
also afforded a complete certainty; of good for the purpose of
5 6 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
control of appetite, desire and affection this latter specification
being one which Greek thought did not include and which
it doubtless would have thought the height of presumption to
lay claim to. Right ordering of human conduct, knowledge of
the highest reality, the enjoyment of the most complete and
unvarying value or good, were combined in one inclusive whole
by means of adoption of the ideas of the complete interdepen-
dence of all things according to universal and necessary law
an idea which he found to be the basis of natural science.
There have been few attempts in modern philosophy as
bold and as direct as is this one to effect a complete integration
of scientific method with a good which is fixed and final, because
based on the rock of absolute cognitive certainty. Few thinkers
have been as willing to sacrifice details of the older tradition
in order to save its substance as was Spinoza. The outcry from
all quarters against him proved that, in the minds of his con-
temporaries and successors, he had made too many concessions
to naturalistic science and necessary law. But this protest should
not conceal from us two essential considerations about his work.
The first of these is that Nature, as the object of knowledge,,
is capable of being the source of constant good and a rule of
life, and thus has all the properties and the functions which
the Jewish- Christian tradition attributed to God. He was hence
entitled to confer upon it the name Natura sive Deus. For
Nature, as he conceived it, carried with it all the emotional
associations and all the moral force and authority found in the
older religious view of God. It provided an immutable End and
Law for conduct, and it was the source, when rationally known,
of perfect peace and unqualified security. Nature was naturally
that is rationally known, and knowledge of it was such a
perfect good that when it takes possession of the human mind
the lesser and otherwise disturbing objects of affection and
passion are so included within it as to fall into their proper
place of subordination : that is, of complete control.
The second consideration is that Spinoza exemplifies with
CONFLICT OF AUTHORITIES 57
extraordinary completeness the nature of the problem of all
modern philosophies which have not deserted the classic tra-
dition, and yet have made the conclusions of modern science
their own. What makes Spinoza so admirably the exponent of
this problem is that he adopted with ardour and without the
reservations displayed by most modern thinkers the essential
elements in the Greek tradition of intellectualism and natural-
ism, the Hebrew-Christian idea of the priority and primacy of
the properties of ultimate Being which concern the control of
human affection and endeavour, and the method and conclusions
of the new natural science as he saw them.
The reluctance of other thinkers to follow the model of
solution of their common problems which he offered was not,
however, wholly due to their desire to save portions of the
older moral and religious tradition that he was willing to sur-
render for what seemed to him a greater and more enduring
good the unification of science with an ethico-religious con-
trol of the springs of human conduct. There were difficulties
from the side of science itself. Its experimental trend, as dis-
tinct from its mathematical strain, was adverse to Spinoza's
unquestioning faith that the logical order and connection of
ideas is one with the order and connection of existence. For
as the new science developed, the experimental necessity for
sense data and verification by observation reduced the role of
logical and mathematical conceptions from a primary to a
secondary rank. Even his predecessor Descartes, also a devotee
of rationalistic method, had seen that there had to be some
warrant for the application of ideas to nature. Other philoso-
phers felt that after all the perfections with which Spinoza
had so richly dowered Nature as the object of knowledge, were,
in spite of his professed denial of teleology, the fruit of
emotion rather than of logic.
We do not need to trace these complications. They are
important for our purpose because they induced so many varia-
tions in the treatment of a single underlying problem: the
58 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
adjustment to each other of two unquestioned convictions : One
that knowledge in the form of science reveals the antecedent
properties of reality; the other, that the ends and laws which
should regulate human affection, desire and intent can be
derived only from the properties possessed by ultimate Being
If the rest of the chapter is given to a brief survey of the
diverse methods of adjustment which have been propounded
it is not for the sake of conveying information upon matters
familiar to all students of philosophy. I am concerned only tc
set forth illustrations of the way in which unyielding adherence
to traditional premises regarding the object of true knowledge
and the source of moral authority have set the problem oi
modern thought, and to provide illustration of the diverse
and incompatible ways in which "solutions" have been sought,
Before the rise of the new science of nature there was
developed a method for adjusting the claims of natural reason
and moral authority by means of a division of the field: the
doctrine of "the twofold nature of truth". The realm of
the ends and values authoritative for conduct was that of the
revealed will of God. The organ for its apprehension was
faith. Nature is the object of knowledge and with respect to it
the claims of reason are supreme. The two realms are so
separate that no conflict can occur. The work of Kant may be
regarded as a perpetuation of the method of adjustment by
means of partition of territories. He did not of course demar-
cate the realm of moral authority on the ground of faith
in revelation. He substituted the idea of faith grounded in
practical reason. But he continued the older distinction of one
realm where the intellect has sway and one in which the
requirements of will are supreme. He retained also the notion
of an isolation of the two fields so complete that there is no
possible overlapping and hence no possibility of interference.
If the kingdoms of science and of righteousness nowhere touch,
there can be no strife between them. Indeed, Kant sought to
arrange their relations or lack of relations in such a way that
CONFLICT OF AUTHORITIES 59
there should be not merely non-interference but a pact of at
least benevolent neutrality.
Kant's system bristles with points of internal difficulty;
many of these are objects of controversy. Ignoring these as
irrelevant to our problem, it can fairly be asserted that the
main characteristic of his system is precisely a division of terri-
tory between the objects of cognitive certitude and those of
equally complete practical moral assurance. The titles of his
two chief works, the Critiques of Pure Reason and of Practical
Reason are memorials to this interpretation. The first aims
to make secure, on rational a priori grounds, the foundations
of natural knowledge; the second performs a like office for
the foundations of moral and religious conceptions. Science
is limited to phenomena in space and time in order that the
world of higher and noumenal realities may be appropriated
by ideals and spiritual values. Each has complete jurisdiction
and undisputed sovereignty in its own realm.
Heine's view that the subject-matter of the practical
critique was an afterthought, a concession to the needs and fears
of the multitude represented by his manservant, is wittily ex-
pressed, but will not stand critical examination. Kant's argu-
ment for the justification of the certitude of the foundations of
knowledge is couched at every point so as to indicate the neces-
sity of a higher although intellectually unapproachable realm.
There was nothing factitious, in Kant's own conception, in the
way in which the two kingdoms excluded each other and yet
made each other necessary. On the contrary, the neat way in
which the elements of each dovetailed into those of the other
was to him a convincing proof of the necessity of the system
as a whole. If the dovetailing was the product of his own
intellectual carpentry, he had no suspicion of the fact.
On the contrary, he thought he had disposed, once for all,
of many of the most perplexing problems of prior philosophy.
Upon the scientific side he was concerned to provide a final
philosophical justification, beyond the reach of scepticism, for
60 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
the Newtonian science. His conception of space and time as
necessary forms of the possibility of perception was the
justification of the application of mathematics to natural
phenomena. Categories of thought necessary to understand
perceived objects an understanding necessary to science
supplied the foundation of permanent substances and uniform
relations of sequence or causation demanded by the New-
tonian theories of atoms and uniform laws. The tendency of
the mind to pass beyond the limits of experience to the thought
of unconditioned and self-sufficient totalities, "Ideas'* of the
universe, soul and God, was explained; and while cognitive
validity was denied these Ideas, they were admitted as regu-
lative ideals which directed inquiry and interpretation. Above
all, the thought of these trans-phenomenal and super-empirical
realities left room that practical reason with its imperative
of duty and postulate of free choice could fill. Thus the su-
premacy of righteousness according to the Hebraic-Christian
tradition was justified independently of revelation by purely
rational means. Moral demand for the final and unquestionable
authority of duty authorized and necessitated practical certainty
as to the reality of objects beyond experience and incapable of
cognitive verification. The quest for certainty was fulfilled;
cognitive certainty in the region of phenomena, practical
certainty in the realm of moral authority.
This outline of obvious points in Kant's system passes over
points which have received much attention such as the "sub-
jectivity" of his view of space and time and the categories; the
contrast of the a priori and the empirical, as well as, in the
Critique of Practical Reason, the seemingly arbitrary way in
which faith in God and immortality are introduced. But with
reference to his ultimate aim of establishing a perfect and
unshakeable adjustment of the certainty of intellectual beliefs
and of moral beliefs, these matters are secondary. The point
3n the practical side that had to be protected at all hazards
was that no concrete and empirical material be permitted to
CONFLICT OF AUTHORITIES 61
influence ultimate moral realities since this would give natural
science jurisdiction over them and bring them under the sway
of mechanical causality. On the cognitive side, the correspond-
ing point to be certified was restriction of natural science to a
strictly phenomenal world. For then there could be no en-
croachment of specific scientific conclusions upon ultimate,
that is ethico-religious, belief.
In its essential framework, the Kantian scheme thus agreed
marvellously well with the needs of the historic crisis. It gave
freedom and a blessing to both science and morals, with a
guarantee that they could never interfere with each other.
Granted the acceptance of the traditional belief that security
of moral authority depends upon some source in Being apart
from the experiences by which values are incarnated in concrete
objects and institutions, the Kantian scheme has such merits
that it is safe to predict that as long as that tradition continues
to have vitality, the main elements of the Kantian system will
have devoted disciples.
The Kantian method is of course but one of a number of
the philosophic attempts at harmonization. There is one phase
of it which may be said to continue the Cartesian attempt to
find the locus of absolute certainty within the knowing mind
itself, surrendering both the endeavour of the ancients to dis-
cover it in the world without, and of the mediaeval world to
find it in an external revelation. In his search for forms and
categories inherent in the very structure of knowing activity,
Kant penetrated far below the superficial level of innate ideas
in which his predecessors had tried to find the locus of certainty.
Some of them were conditions of the possibility of there being
such a thing as cognitive experience. Others were conditions
of there being such a thing as moral experience. His idealistic
successors pushed their way further on the road which Kant
had broken: even thotigh he insisted that the doors were
locked to travelling on it any further than he had gone.
P 9lution by the method of partition is always unsatisfactory
62 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
to minds with an ambition for comprehensiveness, just as it
commends itself to those of a more modest turn. Moreover,
the very neatness with which the essential traits of Kant's two
realms fitted each other suggested a single underlying and
unifying principle. And Kant himself in various writings had
suggested, particularly in his Critique of Judgment, considera-
tions which softened the sharpness of their separation from
each other. Fichte and Hegel saw in these things a challenge to
complete a work which Kant had only confusedly undertaken
and had not had the intellectual courage and clarity to execute.
The controlling purpose of the Post-Kantian idealistic sys-
tems was to accomplish by way of integration the task which
Kant attempted by way of division. The contrast between the
methods of Fichte and Hegel is worth a passing notice. Fichte
was wholly in the Hebraic tradition of the supremacy of the
moral. He accordingly attempted unification of the cognitive
and the practical from the side of moral self, the self from
which issues the imperative of duty. The "is" of knowledge is
to be derived from the "ought to be" of morals. The eifort
does not seem promising; it appears to speak more for the
ethical ardour of his personality than for the sobriety of his
understanding. Yet given the premises as to the certainty and
supremacy in Being of ideal values prior to all action, Fichte 's
method has a logic not to be impeached. If the moral ideal is
the ultimate reality, it is proper to derive the structure and
characteristics of the actual world from the necessities the ideal
imposes and the demands it makes. Argument from the actual
to the ideal is a precarious undertaking, since the actual is in so
many respects so thoroughly un-ideal.
Hegel, on the other hand, is never weary of pouring con-
tempt upon an Ideal that merely ought to be. "The actual is
the rational and the rational is the actual." There is a definite
relaxation of the stern Puritanism of Fichte. The moral task
of man is not to create a world in accord with the ideal but
to appropriate intellectually and in the substance of personality
CONFLICT OP AUTHORITIES 63
the meanings and values already incarnate in an actual world.
Viewed historically, Hegel's system may be looked on as a
triumph in material content of the modern secular and positi-
vistic spirit. It is a glorification of the here and now, an indica-
tion of the solid meanings and values contained in actual
institutions and arts. It is an invitation to the human subject
to devote himself to the mastery of what is already contained
in the here and now of life and the world, instead of hunting
for some remote ideal and repining because it cannot be found
in existence. In form, however, the old tradition remains intact.
The validity of these meanings and values, their "absolute"
character, is proved by their being shown to be manifestations
of the absolute spirit according to a necessary and demonstrative
logical development : even though Hegel had to create a new
logic to establish the identity of meaning and being.
The Hegelian system is somewhat too grandiose for present
taste. Even his followers find it necessary to temper the claims
made for his logical method. And yet if there be a synthesis in
ultimate Being of the realities which can be cognitively sub-
stantiated and of the meanings which should command our
highest admiration and approval, then concrete phenomena,
barring a complete corruption due to some lapse, ought to be
capable of being exhibited as definite manifestations of the
eternal union of the real-ideal. Perhaps there is no system more
repugnant to the admirers of Spinoza than the Hegelian; and
yet Hegel himself felt, and with considerable reason, that he
was simply doing in a specific and concrete way what Spinoza
had undertaken in a formal and mathematical way. However,
the point important for our purpose is that in both Fichte and
Hegel there is expressed the animating spirit of modern ideal-
ism in dealing with the basic problem of all modern philoso-
phies. They have sought by examination of the structure of
the knowing function (psychological structure in the subjective
idealisms and logical structure in the objective idealisms and
usually with a union of both strains) to show that no matter
64 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
what the detailed conclusions of the special sciences, the ideal
authority of truth, goodness and beauty is a secure possession
of ultimate Being independently of experience and human
action.
There have been attempts at adjustment of the results of
knowledge and the demands of ethico-religious authority which
have not been mindful of the classic tradition. Instead of
bringing nature within the fold of value, the order has been
reversed. The physical system has been treated as the supporter
and carrier of all objects having the properties which confer
authority over conduct. A word about the system of Herbert
Spencer among the moderns is appropriate in this connection,
as one about Lucretius would be if antiquity were the theme.
The doctrine that universal evolution is the highest principle
of the physical world, one in which all natural laws are brought
to unity, is accompanied with the idea that the goal of evolution
marks the ideal of moral and religious beliefs and endeavours.
This conclusion is as surely an attempt to adjust the two
elements of the problem as anything found in any idealistic
system. Were there any doubt about this point, Spencer's in-
sistence on the evanescence of evil in the ongoing evolutionary
process would remove it. All evils are the fruits of transitional
maladjustments in the movement of evolution. The perfect
adjustment of man, personal and collective, to the environment
is the evolutionary term, and is one which signifies the elimina-
tion of all evil, physical and moral. The ultimate triumph of
justice and the union of the good of self with the good of
others are identical with the working out of physical law. In
objection to this or that phase of the Spencerian system it is
easily forgotten that fundamentally he is occupied with the
usual quest for a certainty in which a warrant of necessary
knowledge is employed to establish the certainty of Good in
reality.
Comprehensive systems are for the moment out of fashion ;
and yet if cognitive certainty is possible and if it is admitted
CONFLICT OF AUTHORITIES 65
that the justification of value lies in its being a property of the
realities which are the objects of knowledge, comprehensive-
ness, whether of the Hegelian or the Spencerian type, would
seem to be the proper ideal of philosophy. And if one believes
that the conclusions of science exhaust the scope of the
universe, then certainly all moral, social and political goods
must fall within them; in that case such a task as that of
Spencer is not only legitimate but one which philosophy
cannot evade without being subject to the charge of bad faith.
One more illustration awaits us. Contemporary philosophy
in its realistic forms shows a tendency to revert to adjustment
of the cognitive realm and the realm of values by means of the
method of isolation. In detail, however, the method pursued
is unlike that of Kant in that it does not start from the knowing
mind but rather from the objects of knowing. These, it is
argued, show a radical division into the existential and the
non-existential. Physical science deals with the former; mathe-
matics and logic with the latter. In the former, some things,
namely sense-data, are objects of infallible apprehension ; while
certain essences or subsistences, immaterial in nature because
non-existential and non-physical, are the subjects of an equally
assured cognition by reason. Uncertainty appertains only to
combinations of ultimate and simple objects, combinations
formed in reflective thought. As long as we stick to the self-
guaranteed objects, whether of sense or of pure intellect, there
is no opening for any uncertainty or any risk.
** In some of these realisms, intrinsic values are included
among the immaterial essences of which we have infallible and
immediate knowledge. Thus the scheme of cognitive certainty
applies all the way through. Science, in its naturalistic sense, is
true of existences; ultimate morals and logic are true of
essences. Philosophy has to do with the just partitioning of the
field, and with the problems that arise from the union of
existences and essences.
Still another conception of philosophy of a more austere
E
66 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
character has, however, been advanced. According to this view,
values are hopelessly entangled with human affections and im-
pulses, and are too variable to be the objects of any kind of
sure knowledge of anything but variable opinion and guess-
work. The great mistake of historic philosophy has been to
admit values in any shape within the sacred enclosure of per-
fect science. Philosophy is concerned only with propositions
which are true in any possible world, existentially actual or not.
Propositions about good and evil are too dependent upon a
special form of existence, namely human beings with their
peculiar traits, to find a place in the scheme of science. The only
propositions which answer to the specification of pure univer-
sality are logical and mathematical. These by their nature
transcend existence and apply in every conceivable realm.
Owing to the recent developments of mathematics, a philosophy
emancipated from the contingencies of existence is now for
the first time possible.
This view of philosophy has been objected to on the ground
that it rests on an arbitrary limitation of its subject-matter. But
it may be questioned whether this restriction is not a logical
development of that strain in historic philosophy which identi-
fies its subject-matter with whatever is capable of taking on
the form of cognitive certainty. Without committing one's self
to the subjective view of values that seems to be implied, values
are so intimately connected with human affections, choices and
endeavours, that there is ground for holding that the insincere
apologetic features of historic philosophies are connected with
the attempt to combine a theory of the values having moral
authority with a theory of ultimate Being. And a moderate
amount of acquaintance with these philosophies discloses that
they have been interested in justifying values drawn from cur-
rent religious faiths and moral codes, not just eternal values
as such : that they have often used the concept of universal
and intrinsic values to cover those which, if not parochial, were
at least exponents of temporal social conditions.
CONFLICT OF AUTHORITIES 67
The limitation of philosophy to propositions about what is
logically possible eliminates all special physical propositions as
well as all matters of morals, art and religion. In its chaste
austerity it seems to fulfil the demand for cognitive certainty
as no other conception of philosophy can do. Whether one
accepts or rejects it, there is provided by it an explicit way in
which to raise a question. Because of the sharpness of its delimi-
tation of the office of philosophy, it elicits clearly the problem of
the idea to be entertained of that office. For with the restriction
that is made there remains over and untouched a problem of the
greatest possible human significance. What is the bearing of
our existential knowledge at any time, the most dependable
knowledge afforded by inquiry, upon our judgments and
beliefs about the ends and means which are to direct our
conduct ? What does knowledge indicate about the authoritative
guidance of our desires and affections, our plans and policies ?
Unless knowledge gives some regulation, the only alternative
is to fall back on custom, external pressure and the free play
of impulse. There is then need of some theory on this matter.
If we are forbidden to call this theory philosophy by the self-
denying ordinance which restricts it to formal logic, need for
the theory under some other name remains.
There is a fatal ambiguity in the conception of philosophy
as a purely theoretical or intellectual subject. The ambiguity
lies in the fact that the conception is used to cover both the
attitude of the inquirer, the thinker, and the character of
the subject-matter dealt with. The engineer, the physician, the
moralist deal with a subject-matter which is practical ; one, that
is, which concerns things to be done and the way of doing
them. But as far as personal disposition and purpose is con-
cerned, their inquiries are intellectual and cognitive. These men
set out to find out certain things; in order to find them out,
there has to be a purgation of personal desire and preference,
and a willingness to subordinate them to the lead of the subject-
matter inquired into. The mind must be purified as far as is
68 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
humanly possible of bias and of that favouritism for one kind
of conclusion rather than another which distorts observation
and introduces an extraneous factor into reflection.
Except, then, on the premise that the subject-matter of
philosophy is fixed properties of antecedent Being, the fact
that it is an intellectual pursuit signifies nothing beyond the
fact that those who engage in it should respect the canons of
fairness, impartiality, of internal consistency and external
evidence. It carries no implication with it except on the basis
of a prior assumption save that of intellectual honesty. Only
upon the obverse of the adage that whoso drives fat oxen must
himself be fat, can it be urged that logical austerity of personal
attitude and procedure demands that the subject-matter dealt
with must be made lean by stripping it of all that is human
concern. To say that the object of philosophy is truth is to
make a moral statement which applies to every inquiry. It
implies nothing as to the kind of truth which is to be ascer-
tained, whether it be of a purely theoretical nature, of a
practical character, or whether it concerns the bearing of one
upon the other. To assert that contemplation of truth for its
own sake is the highest ideal is to make a judgment concerning
authoritative value. To employ this judgment as a means of
determining the office of philosophy is to violate the canon
that inquiry should follow the lead of subject-matter.
It is fair, then, to conclude that the question of the rela-
tions of theory and practice to each other, and of philosophy
to both of them, has often been compromised by failure to
maintain the distinction between the theoretical interest which
is another name for intellectual candour and the theoretical
interest which defines the nature of subject-matter. Over and
above this fact, there is reason to suppose that much of the
impatience with the suggestion of the practical in connection
with philosophy is due to the habit of associating "practical"
with affairs of narrow personal concern. The significance of the
idea cannot be thus sheared down without an elimination of
CONFLICT OF AUTHORITIES 69
intellectual regard for the values which are to have authority
over our desires and purposes and thus over our entire conduct.
It would seem as if only the cynical sceptic would willingly
take such a stand.
** The discussion has indulged in an excursion from the theme
of the problem of modern philosophies. But it is relevant to
our main topic if it serves to make clear the fundamental
ground for the disparaging view held of practical activity.
Depreciation is warranted on the basis of two premises : first,
namely, that the object of knowledge is some form of
ultimate Being which is antecedent to reflective inquiry and
independent of it; secondly, that this antecedent Being has
among its defining characteristics those properties which alone
have authority over the formation of our judgments of value
that is, of the ends and purposes which should control conduct
in all fields intellectual, social, moral, religious, aesthetic.
Given these premises and only if they are accepted it
follows that philosophy has for its sole office the cognition of
this Being and its essential properties.
I can understand that the tenor of my discussion may have
aroused a certain impatience among those familiar with current
treatment of politics, morals and art. It will be asked : Where
is there any evidence that this treatment is controlled by regard
for antecedently fixed qualifications of what is taken to be ulti-
mately real? It cannot be denied, and I have no interest in
denying, that the vast bulk of critical discussion of such matters
is conducted on quite different grounds, with hardly even a
side glance at any standards which flow from any philosophy
of ultimate grounds. This admission causes two important con-
siderations to stand out the clearer. Traditional religion does
refer all ultimate authoritative norms to the highest reality,
the nature of God ; and failure on the part of those professedly
accepting this religion to carry this reference over to concrete
criticism and judgment in special fields of morals, politics and
art, is only an evidence of the confusion in which modern
70 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
thought is entangled. It is this fact which gives the strict
adherents to old beliefs, such as those trained in the Catholic
faith, an intellectual advantage over "liberals". For the latter
have no philosophy adequate for their undertakings and
commitments.
This consideration brings us to the second point. The failure
to employ standards derived from true Being in the formation
of beliefs and judgments in concrete fields is proof of an isola-
tion from contemporary life that is forced upon philosophy by
its adherence to the two principles which are basic in the classic
tradition. In the middle ages there was no such isolation.
Philosophy and the conduct of life were associated intimately
with one another; there was genuine correspondence. The
outcome is not fortunate for philosophy; it signifies that its
subject-matter is more and more derived from the problems and
conclusions of its own past history ; that it is aloof from the
problems of the culture in which philosophers live.
But the situation has a still more unfortunate phase. For
it signifies intellectual confusion, practically chaos, in respect
to the criteria and principles which are employed in framing
judgments and reaching conclusions upon things of most vital
importance. It signifies the absence of intellectual authority.
Old beliefs have dissolved as far as definite operative hold
upon the regulation of criticism and the formation of plans
and policies, working ideals and ends, is concerned. And there
is nothing else to take their place.
When I say "authority" I do not mean a fixed set of doc-
trines by which to settle mechanically problems as they arise.
Such authority is dogmatic, not intellectual. I mean methods
congruous with those used in scientific inquiry and adopting
their conclusions ; methods to be used in directing criticism and
in forming the ends and purposes that are acted upon. We
have obtained in constantly accelerated measure in the last few
centuries a large amount of sound beliefs regarding the world
in which we live; we have ascertained much that is new and
CONFLICT OF AUTHORITIES 71
striking about life and man. On the other hand, men have
desires and affections, hopes and fears, purposes and intentions
which influence the most important actions performed. These
need intellectual direction. Why has modern philosophy con-
tributed so little to bring about an integration between what
we know about the world and the intelligent direction of what
we do ? The purport of this chapter is to show that the cause
resides in unwillingness to surrender two ideas formulated in
conditions which both intellectually and practically were very
different from those in which we now live. These two ideas, to
repeat, are that knowledge is concerned with disclosure of the
characteristics of antecedent existences and essences, and that
the properties of value found therein provide the authoritative
standards for the conduct of life.
Both of these traits are due to quest for certainty by cogni-
tive means which exclude practical activity namely, one
which effects actual and concrete modifications in existence.
Practical activity suffers from a double discrediting because of
the perpetuation of these two features of tradition. It is a
mere external follower upon knowledge, having no part in its
determination. Instead of evolving its own standards and ends
in its own developing processes, it is supposed to conform to
what is fixed in the antecedent structure of things. Herein we
locate the source of that internal division which was said to
characterize modern philosophic thought. It accepts the con-
clusions of scientific inquiry without remaking the conceptions
of mind, knowledge and the character of the object of knowledge
that are involved in the methods by which these conclusions
are reached.
The chapters of which this is the concluding portion are
introductory. They have tried to make clear a problem and the
reasons why it is a problem. If, as has been intimated, the
problem arises from continued adherence to certain conceptions
framed centuries ago and then embodied in the entire western
tradition, the problem is artificial in as far as it would not
72 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
arise from reflection upon actual conditions of science and life
The next task is accordingly to elucidate the reconstruction
of tradition which are involved in the actual procedure an<
results of knowing, as this is exemplified in physical inquiry
The latter is taken as the type and pattern of knowing since i
is the most perfected of all branches of intellectual inquiry
We shall see that for a long time it also was influenced by th<
survival of the traditional conceptions of knowledge and its
supposed relationship to properties of antecedent existence
while in our own time it has finally emancipated itself anc
arrived at a consciousness of the principles contained in ifc
own method. Having discovered what knowledge means ir
its own terms, that is, in those of the conduct of knowing as i
going concern, we shall be ready to appreciate the great trans-
formation that is demanded in the older notions of mind and
knowledge. Particularly we shall see how completely the
separation of knowing and doing from one another has broken
down. The conclusion of this part of the discussion will be that
standards and tests of validity are found in the consequences oi
overt activity, not in what is fixed prior to it and independently
of it. This conclusion will lead us to the final point, the trans-
formation that is required in the conception of the values
which have authority over conduct.
CHAPTER IV
THE ART OF ACCEPTANCE AND THE ART
OF CONTROL
THERE WAS A TIME when "art" and "science" were virtually
equivalent terms. There is a reminiscence of this period in
university organization in the phrase "faculty of arts and
sciences". A distinction was drawn between the "mechanical"
and the "liberal" arts. In part, this distinction was between
industrial arts and social arts, those concerned with things and
those concerned directly with persons. Grammar and rhetoric,
for example, in dealing with speech, the interpretation of
literature and the arts of persuasion, were higher than black-
smithing and carpentry. The mechanical arts dealt with things
which were merely means; the liberal arts dealt with affairs
that were ends, things having a final and intrinsic worth. The
obviousness of the distinction was re-enforced by social causes.
Mechanics were concerned with mechanical arts; they were
lower in the social scale. The school in which their arts were
learned was the school of practice : apprenticeship to those who
had already mastered the craft and mystery. Apprentices
literally "learned by doing", and "doing" was routine repeti-
tion and imitation of the acts of others, until personal skill
was acquired. The liberal arts were studied by those who were
to be in some position of authority, occupied with some exercise
of social rule. Such persons had the material means that
afforded leisure, and were to engage in callings that had
especial honour and prestige. Moreover, they learned not by
mechanical repetition and bodily practice in manipulation of
materials and tools, but "intellectually", through a kind of
study which involved mind, not body.
The situation is not recalled as if it had a merely historical
significance. It describes in large measure a state of affairs that
exists to-day. The distinction between "learned professions"
74 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
and the occupations of the shop and factory, with correspond-
ing differences of social status, of educational preparation, of
concern chiefly with material things or with persons and social
relations, is too familiar to call for recourse to past history.
The chief difference in the present situation is due to the rise
of technological industry and of a pecuniary economy, at the
expense of the inherited status of the "gentleman", the owner
of large estates in land. So our allusion is pertinent not to
history, but to still existing conditions that are influential in
creating and maintaining the division between theory and
practice, mind and body, ends and instrumentalities.
In addition to this distinction between higher and lower
arts, there always hovered in the background a distinction
between all arts and "science" in the true and ultimate sense of
the words. The liberal arts involved much more of knowledge
and of theoretical study, of use of "mind", than did the me-
chanical. But in their ultimate import they were still connected
with art, with doing, although with a mode of practice held in
higher esteem. They remained within the limits of experience,
although of an experience having a kind of value not found in
the baser arts. The philosophic tradition, as for example it is
formulated by Aristotle, ranked social arts lower than pure
intellectual inquiry, than knowledge as something not to be
put to any use, even a social and moral one. It is conceivable
that historically this point of view might have remained a
mere laudation of its own calling on the part of a small intel-
lectual class. But, as we have already noted, in the expansion
of the Church as a dominant power in Europe, religion affili-
ated this philosophic conception to itself. Theology was
regarded as "science" in a peculiar, a unique, sense, for it alone
was knowledge of supreme and ultimate Being. And the
Church had a direct influence over the hearts and conduct,
the beliefs and judgments, of men that a secluded intellectual
class could never win. As the guardians and dispensers of the
truths and sacraments that determined the eternal destiny, the
THE ARTS OF ACCEPTANCE AND CONTROL 75
eternal happiness or misery of the soul, they effected the
embodiment of ideas originating in philosophy in the culture
of Christendom.
In consequence, differences and distinctions characteristic
of actual social life received the sanction not merely of the
rational formulation of a few philosophic thinkers, but of that
power which had the highest authority and influence in the
lives of men. For this reason, the survey that has been made
of the classic philosophic statement of the dualism between
theory and practice, between mind and body, between reason
and experience (always thought of in terms of sense and the
body) is much more than a piece of historic information. For
in spite of enormous extension of secular interests and of
natural science, of expansion of practical arts and occupations,
of the almost frantic domination of present life by concern for
definite material interests and the organization of society by
forces fundamentally economic, there is no widely held philo-
sophy of life which replaces the traditional classic one as that
was absorbed and modified by the Christian faith.
Traditional philosophy thus has a treble advantage. It has
behind it the multitude of imaginative and emotional associa-
tions and appeals that cluster about any tradition which has
for long centuries been embodied in a dominant institution;
they continue to influence, unconsciously, the minds of those
who no longer give intellectual assent to the tenets on which
the tradition intellectually rests. It has, secondly, the backing
of the persistence of the social conditions out of which the
formulation of the dualism between theory and practice origin-
ally grew the familiar grading of activities from the servile
and mechanical to the liberal, the free and socially esteemed. In
addition, there is the enforced recognition of the peril and
frustration in the actual world of meanings and goods most
prized, a matter which makes men ready to listen to the story
o a higher realm in which these values are eternally safe.
In the third place, and finally, there is the negative counter-
76 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
part of these positive facts. Conditions and forces that dominate
in actual fact the modern world have not attained any coherent
intellectual expression of themselves. We live, as is so often
remarked, in a state of divided allegiance. In outward activities
and current enjoyments, we are frenetically absorbed in
mundane affairs in ways which, if they were formulated for
intellectual acceptance, would be repudiated as low and un-
worthy. We give our emotional and theoretical assent to prin-
ciples and creeds which are no longer actively operative in life.
We have retained enough of the older tradition to recognize
that a philosophy which formulated what, on the whole and in
the mass, we are most concerned with, would be intolerably
materialistic in character. On the other hand, we are not pre-
pared, either intellectually or morally, to frame such a philoso-
phy of the interests and activities that actually dominate our
lives as would elevate them to a plane of truly liberal and
humane significance. We are unable to show that the ideals,
values and meanings which the philosophy we nominally hold
places in another world, are capable of characterizing in a
concrete form, with some measure of security, the world in
which we live, that of our actual experience.
On this account any sincere empirical philosophy that holds
to the possibility of the latter alternative must be prophetic
rather than descriptive. It can offer hypotheses rather than
report of facts adequately in existence. It must support these
hypotheses by argument, rather than by appeal to matters
clearly within the range of easy observation. It is speculative
in that it deals with "futures'*. Candour demands that these
considerations be frankly set forth. But there is also another
side to the matter. There is a distinction between hypotheses
generated in that seclusion from observable fact which renders
them fantasies, and hypotheses that are projections of the possi-
bilities of facts already in existence and capable of report.
There is a difference between the imaginative speculations that
recognize no law except their own dialectic consistency, and
THE ARTS OF ACCEPTANCE AND CONTROL 77
those which rest on an observable movement of events, and
which foresee these events carried to a limit by the force of
their own movement. There is a difference between support by
argument from arbitrarily assumed premises, and an argument
which sets forth the implications of propositions resting upon
facts already vitally significant.
The groundwork of fact that is selected for especial exam-
ination and description in the hypothesis which is to be set
forth is the procedure of present scientific inquiry, in those
matters that are most fully subject to intellectual control
namely, the physical sciences. The state of inquiry in them is
an observable fact, not a speculation nor a matter of opinion
and argument. The selection of this field of fact rather than
some other as that from which to project a hypothesis regard-
ing a future possible experience in which experience will
itself provide the values, meanings and standards now sought
in some transcendent world, has both theoretical and
practical justification. From the point of view of technical
philosophy, the nature of knowledge has always been the
foundation and point of departure for philosophies that have
separated knowing from doing and making, and that in conse-
quence have elevated the objects of knowledge, as measures of
genuine reality, above experiences of objects had by the way of
affection and practical action. If, accordingly, it can be shown
that the actual procedures by which the most authentic and
dependable knowledge is attained have completely surrendered
the separation of knowing and doing ; if it can be shown that
overtly executed operations of interaction are requisite to
obtain the knowledge called scientific, the chief fortress of the
classic philosophical tradition crumbles into dust. With this
destruction disappears also the reason for which some objects,
as fixed in themselves, out of and above the course of human
experience and its consequences, have been set in opposition to
the temporal and concrete world in which we live.
The practical reason for selecting such a technical matter
78 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
as the method of physical science is the fact that the application
of natural science, through the medium of inventions and
technologies, is the finally controlling and characteristic fact
of modern life. That western civilization is increasingly indus-
trial in character is a commonplace; it should be an equally
familiar fact that this industrialization is the direct fruit of
the growth of the experimental method of knowing. The
effects of this industrialization in politics, social arrangements,
communication and intercourse, in work and play, in the
determination of the locus of influence, power and prestige, are
characteristic marks of present experience in the concrete. They
are the ultimate source of that waning of the effective influence
of older beliefs that has been alluded to. They also provide
the reason why a philosophy which merely reflected and
reported the chief features of the existing situation as if they
were final, without regard to what they may become, would
be so repulsively materialistic. Both the positive fact that our
actual life is more and more determined by the results of
physical science, and the negative fact that these results are so
largely an obstacle to framing a philosophy consonant with
present experience so influential in inducing men to hold on
to elements of the older tradition are reasons for selecting
the procedure of natural science as the main theme of our
examination.
There will be little time and opportunity for discussion of
the problem in its immediately practical form the potential
significance of that industrial society which has emerged in
consequence of the conclusions and methods of physical know-
ledge. But it may be pointed out that, in principle, it signifies
simply that the results of intelligence, instead of remaining
aloof and secluded from practice, are embodied in influential
ways in the activities and experience which actually obtain.
Say what we please in derogation of "applied science", in
principle this is what the latter signifies. And there are few
persons, I imagine, who would wittingly proclaim that incarna-
THE ARTS OF ACCEPTANCE AND CONTROL 79
tion of knowledge and understanding in the concrete experi-
ences of life is anything but a good. Derogation on principle
of application of knowledge is, in itself, merely an expression
of the old tradition of the inherent superiority of knowledge
to practice, of reason to experience.
There is a genuine and extremely serious problem in con-
nection with the application of science in life . But it is a practical ,
not theoretical, one. That is to say, it concerns the economic
and legal organization of society in consequence of which the
knowledge which regulates activity is so much the monopoly
of the few, and is used by them in behalf of private and class
interests and not for general and shared use. The problem
concerns the possible transformation of social conditions with
respect to their economic and pecuniary basis. This problem
time and space will not permit me to consider. But the pecuni-
arily economic phase of society is something radically different
from industrialization, and from the inherent consequences
of technology in current life. To identify the two affairs
breeds only confusion. It must also be noted that this is a
question which has of itself nothing to do with the matter
of the relations of theory and practice, of knowledge and its
application in doing and making. The practical and social
problem is one of effecting a more general equitable distribu-
tion of the elements of understanding and knowledge in
connection with work done, activities undertaken, and a
consequent freer and more generously shared participation in
their results.
Before engaging in consideration of the significance of the
method of science for formation of the theory of knowledge
and of mind, we shall take up some general points. These are
all connected, at bottom, with the contrast between the idea
of experience framed when arts were mainly routine, skills
acquired by mere exercise and practice, and the idea of experi-
ence appropriate when arts have become experimental: or,
put briefly, between experience as empirical and as expert-
80 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
mental. " Experience " once meant the results accumulated in
memory of a variety of past doings and undergoings that were
had without control by insight, when the net accumulation
was found to be practically available in dealing with present
situations. Both the original perceptions and uses and the appli-
cation of their outcome in present doings were accidental that
is, neither was determined by an understanding of the relations
of cause and effect, of means and consequences, involved. In
that sense they were non-rational, non-scientific. A typical
illustration is a bridge-builder who constructs simply on the
basis of what has been done and what happened in the past,
without reference to knowledge of strains and stresses, or in
general of physical relationships actually involved; or the art
of medicine, as far as it rests simply upon the accidents of
remedial measures used in the past without knowledge of why
some worked and others did not. A measure of skill results,
but it is the fruit of cut-and-dried methods, of trial and error
in short it is " empirical' '.
The disparaging notion of experience framed under such
conditions is an honest report of actual conditions ; philosophers
in setting experience down as inherently inferior to rational
science were truthful. What they added was another matter.
It was a statement that this inferiority was inherently connected
with the body, with the senses, with material things, with the
uncertainly changing as over against the certain because immut-
able. Unfortunately their theories in explanation of the defects
of experience persisted and became classic after experience itself,
in some of its forms, had become experimental in the sense
of being directed by understanding of conditions and their
consequences. Two points are especially significant with refer-
ence to the split thus produced between the traditional theory of
experience and that which results from noting its experimental
character.
In the traditional theory, which still is the prevailing one,
there were alleged to exist inherent defects in perception and
THE ARTS OF ACCEPTANCE AND CONTROL 81
observation as means of knowledge, in reference to the subject-
matter they furnish. This material, in the older notion, is
inherently so particular, so contingent and variable, that by no
possible means can it contribute to knowledge ; it can result
only in opinion, mere belief. But in modern science there are
only practical defects in the senses, certain limitations of vision,
for example, that have to be corrected and supplemented by
various devices, such as the use of the lens. Every insufficiency
of observation is an instigation to invent some new instrument
which will make good the defect, or it is a stimulus to devising
indirect means, such as mathematical calculations, by which the
limitations of sense will be circumvented. The counterpart of
this change is one in the conception of thought and its relation
to knowing. It was earlier assumed that higher knowledge must '
be supplied by pure thought; pure because apart from experi-
ence, since the latter involves the senses. Now, it is taken for
granted that thought, while indispensable to knowledge of
natural existence, can never in itself provide that knowledge.
Observation is indispensable both to provide authentic
materials to work upon and to test and verify the conclusions
reached by theoretical considerations. A specified kind of
experience is indispensable to science instead of all experience
setting a limit to the possibility of true science.
There is an objective counterpart of this shift. In the older
theory, sense and experience were barriers to true science be-
cause they are implicated in natural change. Their appropriate
and inevitable subject-matter was variable and changing things.
Knowledge in its full and valid sense is possible only of the
immutable, the fixed; that alone answers the quest for cer-
tainty. With regard to changing things, only surmise and
opinion are possible, just as practically these are the source
of peril. To a scientific man, in terms of what he does in
inquiry, the notion of a natural science which should turn its
back upon the changes of things, upon events, is simply incom-
prehensible. What he is interested in knowing, in understanding,
82 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
are precisely the changes that go on; they set his problems,
and problems are solved when changes are interconnected with
one another. Constants and relative invariants figure, but they
are relations between changes, not the constituents of a higher
realm of Being. With this modification with respect to the
object comes one in the structure and content of "experience".
Instead of there being a fixed difference between it and some-
thing higher rational thought there is a difference between
two kinds of experience ; one which is occupied with uncon-
trolled change and one concerned with directed and regulated
change. And this difference, while fundamentally important,
does not mark a fixed division. Changes of the first type are
something to be brought under control by means of action
directed by understanding of relationships.
In the old scheme, knowledge, as science, signified precisely
and exclusively turning away from change to the changeless.
In the new experimental science, knowledge is obtained in
exactly the opposite way, namely, through deliberate institu-
tion of a definite and specified course of change. The method
of physical inquiry is to introduce some change in order to
see what other change ensues; the correlation between these
changes, when measured by a series of operations, constitutes
the definite and desired object of knowledge. There are two
degrees of control of change which differ practically but are
alike in principle. In astronomy, for example, we cannot intro-
duce variation into remote heavenly bodies. But we can
deliberately alter the conditions under which we observe them,
which is the same thing in principle of logical procedure. By
special instruments, the use of lens and prism, by telescopes,
spectroscopes, interferometers, etc., we modify observed data.
Observations are taken from widely different points in space
and at successive times. By such means interconnected varia-
tions are observed. In physical and chemical matters closer at
hand and capable of more direct manipulation, changes intro-
duced affect the things under inquiry. Appliances and reagents
THE ARTS OF ACCEPTANCE AND CONTROL 83
for bringing about variations in the things studied are em-
ployed. The progress of inquiry is identical with advance in
the invention and construction of physical instrumentalities for
producing, registering and measuring changes.
Moreover, there is no difference in logical principle between
the method of science and the method pursued in technologies.
The difference is practical; in the scale of operations con-
ducted; in the lesser degree of control through isolation of
conditions operative, and especially in the purpose for the
sake of which regulated control of modifications of natural
existences and energies is undertaken; especially, since the
dominant motive of large-scale regulation of the course of
change is material comfort or pecuniary gain. But the technique
of modern industry, in commerce, communication, transporta-
tion and all the appliances of light, heat and electricity, is the
fruit of the modern application of science. And this so-called
" application "signifies that the same kind of intentional introduc-
tion and management of changes which takes place in the labora-
tory is induced in the factory, the railway and the power-house.
The central and outstanding fact is that the change in the
method of knowing, due to the scientific revolution begun in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, has been accompanied
by a revolution in the attitude of man toward natural occur-
rences and their interactions. This transformation means, as
was intimated earlier, a complete reversal in the traditional
relationship of knowledge and action. Science advances by
adopting the instruments and doings of directed practice, and
the knowledge thus gained becomes a means of the develop-
ment of arts which bring nature still further into actual and
potential service of human purposes and valuations. The
astonishing thing is that in the face of this change wrought
in civilization, there still persist the notions about mind and its
organs of knowing, together with the inferiority of practice to
intellect, which developed in antiquity as the report of a totally
different situation.
84 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
The hold which older conceptions have gained over the
minds of thinkers, the sway of inertia in habits of philosophic
thought, can be most readily judged by turning to books on
epistemology and to discussions of problems connected with the
theory of knowledge published in the philosophical periodicals.
Articles on logical method will be found which reflect the pro-
cedures of actual knowing, that is of the practice of scientific
inquiry. But logic is then usually treated as "mere" method-
ology, having little (probably nothing would be nearer the
mark) to do with the theory of knowledge. The latter is dis-
cussed in terms of conceptions about mind and its organs;
these conceptions are supposed to be capable of adequate
formation apart from observation of what goes on when men
engage in successful inquiry. Of late, the main problem in
such discussions is to frame a theory of "consciousness" which
shall explain knowing, as if consciousness were either a fact
whose meaning is self-evident, or something less obscure in
content and more observable than are the objective and public
procedures of scientific investigation. This type of discussion
persists; it is, in current conception, the theory of knowledge,
the natural and inevitable way in which to discuss its basic
problems! Volumes could not say more for the persistence
of traditional ideas. The import of even a rudimentary dis-
cussion of actual experimental method can hardly be gathered,
then, without bearing in mind its significance as a contrast
effect.
While the traits of experimental inquiry are familiar, so little
use has been made of them in formulating a theory of knowledge
and of mind in relation to nature that a somewhat explicit
statement of well-known facts is excusable. They exhibit three
outstanding characteristics. The first is the obvious one that all
experimentation involves overt doing, the making of definite
changes in the environment or in our relation to it. The second
is that experiment is not a random activity but is directed by
ideas which have to meet the conditions set by the need of
THE ARTS OF ACCEPTANCE AND CONTROL 85
the problem inducing the active inquiry. The third and con-
cluding feature, in which the other two receive their full
measure of meaning, is that the outcome of the directed activity
is the construction of a new empirical situation in which objects
are differently related to one another, and such that the conse-
quences of directed operations form the objects that have the
property of being known.
The rudimentary prototype of experimental doing for the
sake of knowing is found in ordinary procedures. When we
are trying to make out the nature of a confused and unfamiliar
object, we perform various acts with a view to establishing a
new relationship to it, such as will bring to light qualities which
will aid in understanding it. We turn it over, bring it into a
better light, rattle and shake it, thump, push and press it, and
so on. The object as it is experienced prior to the introduction
of these changes baffles us ; the intent of these acts is to make
changes which will elicit some previously unperceived qualities,
and by varying conditions of perception shake loose some
property which as it stands blinds or misleads us.
While such experimentations, together with a kind of
experimental playing with things just to see what will happen,
are the chief source of the everyday non-scientific store of
information about things around us, forming the bulk of
" common-sense " knowledge, the limitations of the mode of
procedure are so evident as to require no exposition. The
important thing in the history of modern knowing is the rein-
forcement of these active doings by means of instruments,
appliances and apparatus devised for the purposes of disclosing
relations not otherwise apparent, together with, as far as overt
action is concerned, the development of elaborate techniques
for the introduction of a much greater range of variations
that is, a systematic variation of conditions so as to produce a
corresponding series of changes in the thing under investiga-
tion. Among these operations should be included, of course,
those which give a permanent register of what is observed and
86 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
the instrumentalities of exact measurement by means of which
changes are correlated with one another.
These matters are so familiar that their full import for
the theory of knowing readily escapes notice. Hence the need
of comparing this kind of knowledge of natural existences with
that obtaining before the rise of the experimental method.
The striking difference is, of course, the dependence placed
upon doing, doing of a physical and overt sort. Ancient science,
that is, what passed as science, would have thought it a kind
of treason to reason as the organ of knowing to subordinate it
to bodily activity on material things, helped out with tools
which are also material. It would have seemed like admitting
the superiority of matter to rational mind, an admission which
from its standpoint was contradictory to the possibility of
knowledge.
With this fundamental change goes another, that in the
attitude taken toward the material of direct sense-perception.
No notion could be further away from the fact than the some-
what sedulously cultivated idea that the difference between
ancient and modern science is that the former had no respect
for perception and relied exclusively upon speculation. In fact,
the Greeks were keenly sensitive to natural objects and were
keen observers. The trouble lay not in substitution of theoriz-
ing from the outset for the material of perception, but in that
they took the latter "as is"; they made no attempt to modify
it radically before undertaking thinking and theorizing about
it. As far as observation unaided by artificial appliances and
means for deliberate variation of observed material went, the
Greeks went far.
Their disrespect for sensibly observed material concerned
only its form. For it had to be brought under logical forms
supplied by rational thought. The fact that the material was
not exclusively logical, or such as to satisfy the requirements
of rational form, made the resulting knowledge less scientific
than that of pure mathematics, logic and metaphysics occupied
THE ARTS OF ACCEPTANCE AND CONTROL 87
with eternal Being. But as far as science extended, it dealt with
the material of sense-perception as it directly offered itself to
a keen and alert observer. In consequence, the material of
Greek natural science is much closer to "common-sense"
material than are the results of contemporary science. One can
read the surviving statements of it without any more technical
preparation than say a knowledge of Euclidean geometry,
while no one can follow understandingly the reports of most
modern investigations in physics without a highly technical
preparatory education. One reason the atomic theory pro-
pounded in antiquity made so little headway is that it did not
agree with the results of ordinary observation. For this pre-
sented objects clothed with rich qualities and falling into kinds
or species that were themselves marked by qualitative, rather
than by merely quantitative and spatial, differences. In antiquity
it was the atomic theory which was purely speculative and
"deductive" in character.
These statements would be misunderstood if they were
taken to imply an allegation that in ancient science sense
gives knowledge, while modern science excludes the material
of sense; such an idea inverts the facts. But ancient science
accepted the material of sense-material on its face, and then
organized it, as it naturally and originally stood, by operations
of logical definition, classification into species and syllogistic
subsumption. Men either had no instruments and appliances
for modifying the ordinary objects of observation, for analys-
ing them into their elements and giving them new forms and
arrangements, or they failed to use those which they had. Thus
in content, or subject-matter, the conclusions of Greek science
(which persisted till the scientific revolution of the seventeenth
century), were much closer to the objects of everyday experi-
ence than are the objects of present scientific thought. It is
not meant that the Greeks had more respect for the function
of perception through the senses than has modern science,
but that, judged from present practice, they had altogether
88 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
too much respect for the material of direct, unanalysed sense-
perception.
They were aware of its defects from the standpoint of know-
ledge. But they supposed that they could correct these defects
and supplement their lack by purely logical or "rational"
means. They supposed that thought could take the material
supplied by ordinary perception, eliminate varying and hence
contingent qualities, and thus finally reach the fixed and im-
mutable form which makes particulars have the character they
have; define this form as the essence or true reality of the
particular things in question, and then gather a group of per-
ceived objects into a species which is as eternal as its particular
exemplifications are perishable. The passage from ordinary
perception to scientific knowledge did not therefore demand
the introduction of actual, overt and observed changes into the
material of sense-perception. Modern science, with its changes
in the subject-matter of direct perception effected by the use
of apparatus, gets away not from observed material as such,
but from the qualitative characteristics of things as they are
originally and "naturally" observed.
It may thus be fairly asserted that the "categories" of
Greek description and explanation of natural phenomena were
aesthetic in character; for perception of the aesthetic sort is
interested in things in their immediate qualitative traits. The
logical features they depended upon to confer scientific form
upon the material of observation were harmony, proportion or
measure, symmetry: these constitute the "logos" that renders
phenomena capable of report in rational discourse. In virtue of
these properties, superimposed upon phenomena but thought
to be elicited from them, natural objects are knowable. Thus
the Greeks employed thinking not as a means of changing
given objects of observation so as to get at the conditions and
effects of their occurrence, but to impose upon them certain
static properties not found in them in their changeable occur-
rence. The essence of the static properties conferred upon
THE ARTS OF ACCEPTANCE AND CONTROL 89
them was harmony of form and pattern. Craftsmen, architects,
sculptors, gymnasts, poets had taken raw material and con-
verted it into finished forms marked by symmetry and
proportion ; they accomplished this task without the prior dis-
integrative reduction which characterizes modern making in
the factory. Greek thinkers performed a like task for nature
as a whole. Instead, however, of employing the material tools
of the crafts, they depended upon thought alone. They bor-
rowed the form provided them in Greek art in abstraction from
its material appliances. They aimed at constructing out of
nature, as observed, an artistic whole for the eye of the soul
to behold. Thus for science nature was a cosmos. It was com-
posed, but it was not a composite of elements. That is, it was a
qualitative whole, a whole as is a drama, a statue or a temple,
in virtue of a pervading and dominant qualitative unity; it
was not an aggregate of homogeneous units externally arranged
in different modes. Design was the form and pattern in-
trinsically characteristic of things in their fixed kinds, not
something first formed in a designing mind and then imposed
from without.
In his Creative Evolution, Bergson remarks that to the
Greek mind that reality which is the object of the truest know-
ledge is found in some privileged moment when a process of
change attains its climactic apogee. The Ideas of Plato and the
Forms of Aristotle, as he says, may be compared in their rela-
tion to particular things to the horses of the Parthenon frieze
in relation to the casual movements of horses. The essential
movement which gives and defines the character of the horse
is summed up in the eternal moment of a static position and
form. To see, to grasp, that culminating and defining form,
and by grasping to possess and enjoy it, is to know.
This aperfu of Bergson illustrates the conception of the
essentially artistic character possessed for Greek science by the
object of knowledge. It is borne out by the details of Greek
science. I know of no one thing more significant for an under-
90 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
standing of Greek science than Aristotle's treatment of quantity
as an accident, that is, as something which can vary within
limits (set by the inherent essence and measure, logos) of a
thing without affecting its nature. When we think of the
Cartesian definition of quantity as the essence of matter, we
appreciate that an intellectual revolution has taken place: a
radical change in point of view and not just the product of
more, and more accurately stated, information, but a change
involving surrender of the aesthetic character of the object.
Contrast the place occupied in modern science by relations with
the Aristotelean illustrations of their nature namely, distinc-
tions of more and less, greater and smaller, etc. For the point
of Aristotle's treatment is that relations, like quantity, are
indifferent to the essence or nature of the object, and hence
are of no final account for scientific knowledge. This conception
is thoroughly appropriate to an aesthetic point of view, wherein
that which is internally complete and self-sufficing is the all-
important consideration.
The addiction of Pythagorean-Platonism to number and
geometry might seem to contradict what has been said. But it
is one of the exceptions that prove the rule. For geometry and
number in this scheme were means of ordering natural
phenomena as they are directly observed. They were principles
of measure, symmetry and allotment that satisfied canons
essentially aesthetic. Science had to wait almost two thousand
years for mathematics to become an instrument of analysis,
of resolution into elements for the sake of recomposition,
through equations and other functions.
I pass by the evidence of the qualitative character of Greek
science afforded by the central position of kinds or species in
Peripatetic science. The instance is too obvious. More instruc-
tive is the purely qualitative treatment of movements, especially
as this is the matter that gives the clue to the revolution wrought
by Galileo. Movement was a term covering all sorts of qualita-
tive alterations, such as warm things becoming cold, growth
THE ARTS OF ACCEPTANCE AND CONTROL 91
from embryo to adult form, etc. It was never conceived of
as merely motion, i.e., change of position in a homogeneous
space. When we speak of a musical movement, or a political
movement, we come close to the sense attached to the idea
in ancient science : a series of changes 'tending to complete
or perfect a qualitative whole and fulfil an end.
Movement instead of continuing indefinitely spent itself; it
tended inherently toward its own cessation, toward rest. The
problem was not what external forces bring the arrow to a
state of relative rest but what external forces, currents of air,
etc., keep it moving and prevent its speedier attainment of
its own natural goal, rest. Cessation of movement is either
exhaustion, a kind of fatigue, or it marks the culmination of
intrinsic proper being or essence. The heavenly bodies, just
because they are heavenly, and therefore quasi-divine, are
unwearied, never tiring, and so keep up their ceaseless round.
For rest when it meant fulfilment was not dead quiescence but
complete and therefore unchanging movement. Only thought
is completely possessed of this perfect self-activity; but the
constant round of heavenly bodies is the nearest physical
manifestation of the self-enclosed changeless activity of thought,
which discovers nothing, learns nothing, effects nothing, but
eternally revolves upon itself.
The treatment of place or rather places is the counter-
part of this qualitative diversification of movements. There is
movement up from the earth, in the measure of their lightness,
of those things which belong in the upper spaces; a downward
movement to the earth of those things which because of their
grossness attain their end and arrive at their home only in the
gross and relatively cold earth. To the intermediate regions is
appropriate neither upward nor downward movement but the
back and forth and wavering movement characteristic of winds
and the (apparent) motions of the planets. As the cold and
heavy moves down, the light and fiery, the finest material,
moves upward. The stars of the firmament being the most
92 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
nearly divine, the most purged of the irregular and merely
potential, pursue that undeviating circular course which is the
nearest approach hi nature to the eternal self-activity of
thought, which is at once beyond nature and its culmination
or "final cause".
These details are mentioned to make clear the completely
qualitative character of antique science. There was no conflict
with ideas about values, because the qualities belonging to
objects of science are values ; they are the things we enjoy and
prize. Throughout nature as a qualitative whole there is a
hierarchy of forms from those of lower value to those of
higher. The revolution in science effectively initiated by
Galileo consisted precisely in the abolition of qualities as traits
of scientific objects as such. From this elimination proceeded
just that conflict and need of reconciliation between the
scientific properties of the real and those which give moral
authority. Therefore to apprehend what the new astronomy
and physics did for human beliefs, we have to place it in its
contrast with the older natural science, in which the qualities
possessed by objects of scientific knowledge were precisely the
same as those possessed by works of art, the properties which
are one with beauty and with all that is admirable.
The work of Galileo was not a development, but a revolu-
tion. It marked a change from the qualitative to the quantita-
tive or metric; from the heterogeneous to the homogeneous;
from intrinsic forms to relations; from aesthetic harmonies
to mathematical formulae; from contemplative enjoyment to
active manipulation and control; from rest to change; from
eternal objects to temporal sequence. The idea of a two-realm
scheme persisted for moral and religious purposes ; it vanished
for purposes of natural science. The higher realm which had
been the object of true science became the exclusive habitat of
objects connected with values that in their relation to man
furnish the norm and end of human destiny. The lower realm
of change which had been the subject of opinion and practice
THE ARTS OF ACCEPTANCE AND CONTROL 93
became the sole and only object of natural science. The realm
in which opinion held sway was no longer a genuine although
inferior portion of objective being. It was a strictly human
product, due to ignorance and error. Such was the philosophy
which, because of the new science, replaced the old metaphysics.
But and this "but" is of fundamental importance in spite
of the revolution, the old conceptions of knowledge as related
to an antecedent reality and of moral regulation as derived
from properties of this reality, persisted.
Neither the scientific nor the philosophic change came at
once, even after experimental inquiry was initiated. In fact, as
we shall see later, philosophy proceeded conservatively by
compromise and accommodation, and was read into the new
science, so that not till our own generation did science free
itself from some basic factors of the older conception of nature.
Much of the scientific revolution was implicit, however, in the
conclusions which Galileo drew from his two most famous
experiments. The one with falling bodies at the tower of Pisa
destroyed the old distinction of intrinsic qualitative differences
of gravity and levity, and thus gave an enormous shock to the
qualitative explanatory principles of science. It thus tended to
undermine the description and explanation of natural phe-
nomena in terms of heterogeneous qualities. For it showed
that the immanent motion of bodies was connected with a
common homogeneous property, one measured by their re-
sistance to being set in motion and to having their motion
arrested or deflected when ones set in operation. This property,
called inertia, was finally identified by Newton with mass, so
that mass or inertia became the scientific definition or stable
co-efficient of matter, in complete indifference to the qualitative
differentiations of wet-dry, hot-cold, which were henceforth
things to be explained by means of mass and motion, not
fundamental explanatory principles.
Taken in isolation, it is conceivable that this result would
have been only a shock, or at most a ferment. Not so, however,
94 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
when it was connected with his experiment of balls rolling
down a smooth inclined plane (of which his experiment with
the pendulum was a variation), the nearest approximation he
could make to observation of freely falling bodies. His purpose
was to determine the relation of the measured time of falling
to the measured space passed through. Observed results con-
firmed the hypothesis he had previously formed, namely, that
the space traversed is proportional to the square of the elapsed
time. If we forget the background of Peripatetic science against
which this conclusion was projected, it appears as a mathe-
matical determination of acceleration, and in connection with
the concept of mass, as affording a new and accurate definition
of force. This result is highly important. But apart from the
classic background of beliefs about nature, it would have been
of the same type as important discoveries in physics to-day.
In its opposition to the basic ideas of Peripatetic science, it
ushered in the scientific revolution. Galileo's conclusions were
absolutely fatal to the traditional conception that all bodies in
motion come naturally to rest because of their own intrinsic
tendency to fulfil an inherent nature. The ingenious mind of
Galileo used his results to show that if a body moving on a
horizontal plane, not subjected to the independent force of
uniform gravity, were substituted for the body on an inclined
plane, it would when once set in motion continue in motion
indefinitely the idea later formulated in Newton's first law
of motion.
The revolution opened the way to description and expla-
nation of natural phenomena on the basis of homogeneous
space, time, mass and motion. Our discussion is not an account
of the historic development, and details are passed over. But
some of the generic results which followed must be summarily
mentioned. Galileo's conclusion did not at first affect the tra-
dition that bodies at rest remained at rest. But his logic and
the further use of his methods showed that when a gross
body is brought to rest, motion is transferred to its own
THE ARTS OF ACCEPTANCE AND CONTROL 95
particles and to those of the body which checked its movement.
Thus heat became subject to mechanical treatment, and in the
end the conversion of mechanical motion, heat, light, electricity
into one another without loss of energy was established. Then
it was shown by Newton, following Copernicus and Huygens,
that the movements of the planets obey the same mechanical
laws of mass and acceleration as mundane bodies. Heavenly
bodies and movements were brought under the same laws
as are found in terrestrial phenomena. The idea of the
difference in kind between phenomena in different parts of
space was abolished. All that counted for science became
mechanical properties formulated in mathematical terms:
the significance of mathematical formulation marking the
possibility of complete equivalence or homogeneity of
translation of different phenomena into one another's
terms.
From the standpoint of the doctrine that the purpose of
knowledge is to grasp reality and that the object of cognition
and real objects are synonymous terms, there was but one
conclusion possible. This, in the words of a recent writer, was
that "the Newtonian astronomy revealed the whole heavenly
realm as a dark and limitless emptiness wherein dead matter
moved under the impulse of insensate forces, and thus finally
destroyed the poetic dream of ages". 1
The conclusion holds good, however, only under condition
that the premise be held to. If and as far as the qualitative
world was taken to be an object of knowledge, and not of
experience in some other form than knowing, and as far as
knowing was held to be the standard or sole valid mode of
experiencing, the substitution of Newtonian for Greek science
(the latter being but a rationalized arrangement of the quali-
tatively enjoyed world of direct experience) signified that the
properties that render the world one of delight, admiration and
1 Barry, The Scientific Habit of Mind, New York, 1927, p. 249. I owe
much more to this volume than this particular quotation.
96 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
esteem have been done away with. There is, however, another
interpretation possible. A philosophy which holds that we
experience things as they really are apart from knowing, and
that knowledge is a mode of experiencing things which facilitates
control of objects for purposes of non-cognitive experiences,
will come to another conclusion.
To go into this matter at this point would, however, antici-
pate later discussion. Consequently we confine comment here
to the one question: Just what did the new experimental
method do to the qualitative objects of ordinary experience?
Forget the conclusions of Greek philosophy, put out of the mind
all theories about knowledge and about reality. Take the simple
direct facts: Here are the coloured, resounding, fragrant,
lovable, attractive, beautiful things of nature which we enjoy,
and which we suffer when they are hateful, ugly, disgusting.
Just what is the effect upon them wrought by physical science ?
If we consent for the time being to denude the mind of
philosophical and metaphysical presuppositions, and take the
matter in the most simple and naive way possible, I think our
answer, stated in technical terms, will be that it substitutes data
for objects. (It is not meant that this outcome is the whole
effect of the experimental method ; that as we saw at the outset
is complex; but that the first effect as far as stripping away
qualities is concerned is of this nature.) That Greek science
operated with objects in the sense of the stars, rocks, trees, rain,
warm and cold days of ordinary experience is evident enough.
What is signified by saying that the first effect of experimenta-
tion was to reduce these things from the status of objects to
that of data may not be so clear. 1 By data is signified subject-
matter for further interpretation; something to be thought
about. Objects are finalities; they are complete, finished; they
call for thought only in the way of definition, classification,
^ogical arrangement, subsumption in syllogisms, etc. But data
1 For this shift from objects to data see G. H. Mead's essay in the
volume entitled Creative Intelligence. New York, 1917.
THE ARTS OF ACCEPTANCE AND CONTROL 97
signify "material to serve"; they are indications, evidence,
signs, clues to and of something still to be reached; they are
intermediate, not ultimate ; means, not finalities.
In a less technical way the matter may be stated as follows :
The subject-matter which had been taken as satisfying the
demands of knowledge, as the material with which to frame
solutions, became something which set problems. Hot and cold,
wet and dry, light and heavy, instead of being self-evident
matters with which to explain phenomena, were things to be
investigated; they were "effects", not causal principles; they
set question marks instead of supplying answers. The differences
between the earth, the region of the planets, and the heavenly
ether, instead of supplying ultimate principles which could be
used to mark off and classify things, were something to be
explained and to bring under identical principles. Greek and
mediaeval science formed an art of accepting things as they are
enjoyed and suffered. Modern experimental science is an art
of control.
The remarkable difference between the attitude which
accepts the objects of ordinary perception, use and enjoyment
as final, as culminations of natural processes, and that which
takes them as starting-points for reflection and investigation,
is one which reaches far beyond the technicalities of science.
It marks a revolution in the whole spirit of life, in the entire
attitude taken toward whatever is found in existence. When
the things which exist around us, which we touch, see, hear
and taste, are regarded as interrogations for which an answer
must be sought (and must be sought by means of deliberate
introduction of changes till they are reshaped into something
different), nature as it already exists ceases to be something
which must be accepted and submitted to, endured or en-
joyed, just as it is. It is now something to be modified, to be
intentionally controlled. It is material to act upon so as to
transform it into new objects which better answer our needs.
Nature as it exists at any particular time is a challenge, rather
G
98 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
than a completion; it provides possible starting-points and
opportunities rather than final ends.
In short, there is a change from knowing as an aesthetic
enjoyment of the properties of nature regarded as a work of
divine art, to knowing as a means of secular control that is,
a method of purposefully introducing changes which will alter
the direction of the course of events. Nature as it exists at a
given time is material for arts to be brought to bear upon it to
reshape it, rather than already a finished work of art. Thus
the changed attitude toward change to which reference was
made has a much wider meaning than that which the new
science offered as a technical pursuit. When correlations of
changes are made the goal of knowledge, the fulfilment of its
aim in discovery of these correlations is equivalent to placing
in our hands an instrument of control. When one change is
given, and we know with measured accuracy its connection with
another change, we have the potential means of producing or
averting that other event. The aesthetic attitude is of necessity
directed to what is already there; to what is finished, com-
plete. The attitude of control looks to the future, to pro-
duction.
The same point is stated in another way in saying that the
reduction of given objects to data for a knowing or an investi-
gation still to be undertaken liberates man from subjection to
the past. The scientific attitude, as an attitude of interest in
change instead of interest in isolated and complete fixities, is
necessarily alert for problems ; every new question is an oppor-
tunity for further experimental inquiries for effecting more
directed change. There is nothing which a scientific mind
would more regret than reaching a condition in which there
were no more problems. That state would be the death of
science, not its perfected life. We have only to contrast this
disposition with that which prevails in morals and politics to
realize the difference which has already been made, as well as
to appreciate how limited its development still is. For in higher
THE ARTS OF ACCEPTANCE AND CONTROL 99
practical matters we still live in dread of change and of prob-
lems. Like men of olden time with respect to natural phe-
nomena we prefer to accept and endure or to enjoy as the
case may happen to be what is, what we find in possession
of the field, and at most, to arrange it under concepts, and
thus give it the form of rationality.
Before the rise of experimental method, change was simply
an inevitable evil; the world of phenomenal existence, that is
of change, while an inferior realm compared with the change-
less, was nevertheless there and had to be accepted practically
as it happened to occur. The wise man if he were sufficiently
endowed by fortune would have as little to do with such things
as possible, turning away from them to the rational realm.
Qualitative forms and complete ends determined by nature
are not amenable to human control. They are grateful when
they happen to be enjoyed, but for human purposes nature
means fortune, and fortune is the contrary of art. A good that
happens is welcome. Goods, however, can be made secure in
existence only through regulation of processes of change, a
regulation dependent upon knowledge of their relations. While
the abolition of fixed tendencies toward definite ends has been
mourned by many as if it involved a despiritualization of
nature, it is in fact a precondition of the projection of new ends
and of the possibility of realizing them through intentional
activity. Objects which are not fixed goals of nature and
which have no inherent defining forms become candidates for
receiving new qualities ; mens for serving new purposes. Until
natural objects were denuded of determinate ends which were
regarded as the proper outcome of the intrinsic tendency of
nature's own operations, nature could not become a plastic
material of human desires and purposes.
Such considerations as these are implicit in that changed
attitude which by experimental analysis reduces objects to data:
the aim of science becomes discovery of constant relations
among changes in place of definition of objects immutable
ioo THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
beyond the possibility of alteration. It is interested in the
mechanism of occurrences instead of in final causes. In dealing
with the proximate instead of with the ultimate, knowledge
deals with the world in which we live, the world which is
experienced, instead of attempting through the intellect to
escape to a higher realm. Experimental knowledge is a mode
of doing, and like all doing takes place at a time, in a place,
and under specifiable conditions in connection with a definite
problem.
The notion that the findings of science are a disclosure of
the inherent properties of the ultimate real, of existence at
large, is a survival of the older metaphysics. It is because of
injection of an irrelevant philosophy into interpretation of the
conclusions of science that the latter are thought to eliminate
qualities and values from nature. Thus is created the standing
problem of modern philosophy : the relation of science to the
things we prize and love and which have authority in the direc-
tion of conduct. The same injection, in treating the results of
mathematical-mechanistic science as a definition of natural
reality in its own intrinsic nature, accounts for the antagonism
shown to naturalism, and for the feeling that it is the business
of philosophy to demonstrate the being of a realm beyond
nature, one not subject to the conditions which mark all natural
objects. Drop the conception that knowledge is knowledge only
when it is a disclosure and definition of the properties of fixed
and antecedent reality ; interpret the aim and test of knowing
by what happens in the actual procedures of scientific inquiry,
and the supposed need and problem vanish.
\ For scientific inquiry always starts from things of the
environment experienced in our everyday life, with things we
see, handle, use, enjoy and suffer from. This is the ordinary
qualitative world. But instead of accepting the qualities and
values the ends and forms of this world as providing the
objects of knowledge, subject to their being given a certain
logical arrangement, experimental inquiry treats them as
THE ARTS OF ACCEPTANCE AND CONTROL 101
offering a challenge to thought. They are the materials of
problems, not of solutions. They are to be known, rather
than objects of knowledge. The first step in knowing is to
locate the problems which need solution. This step is per-
formed by altering obvious and given qualities. These are
effects; they are things to be understood, and they are under-
stood in terms of their generation. The search for "efficient
causes" instead of for final causes, for extrinsic relations in-
stead of intrinsic forms, constitutes the aim of science. But the
search does not signify a quest for reality in contrast with
experience of the unreal and phenomenal. It signifies a search
for those relations upon which the occurrence of real qualities
and values depends, by means of which we can regulate their
occurrence. To call existences as they are directly and quali-
tatively experienced "phenomena" is not to assign to them a
metaphysical status. It is to indicate that they set the problem
of ascertaining the relations of interaction upon which their
occurrence depends.
It is unnecessary that knowledge should be concerned with
existence as it is directly experienced in its concrete qualities.
Direct experiencing itself takes care of that matter. What
science is concerned with is the happening of these experienced
things. For its purpose, therefore, they are happenings, events.
Its aim is to discover the conditions and consequences of their
happening. And this discovery can take place only by modify-
ing the given qualities in such ways that relations become mani-
fest. We shall see later that these relations constitute the
proper objects of science as such. We are here concerned to
emphasize the fact that elimination of the qualities of experi-
enced existence is merely an intermediate step necessary to
the discovery of relations, and that when it is accomplished the
scientific object becomes the means of control of occurrence of
experienced things having a richer and more secure equipment
of values and qualities.
Only when the older theory of knowledge and metaphysics
102 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
is retained is science thought to inform us that nature in its
true reality is but an interplay of masses in motion, without
sound, colour, or any quality of enjoyment and use. What
science actually does is to show that any natural object we
please may be treated in terms of relations upon which its
occurrence depends, or as an event, and that by so treating it
we are enabled to get behind, as it were, the immediate quali-
ties the object of direct experience presents, and to regulate
their happening, instead of having to wait for conditions
beyond our control to bring it about. Reduction of experienced
objects to the form of relations, which are neutral as respects
qualitative traits, is a prerequisite of ability to regulate the
course of change, so that it may terminate in the occurrence of
an object having desired qualities.
As long, for example, as water is taken to be just the thing
which we directly experience it to be, we can put it to a few
direct uses, such as drinking, washing, etc. Beyond heating it
there was little that could be done purposefully to change its
properties. When, however, water is treated not as the glisten-
ing, rippling object with the variety of qualities that delight
the eye, ear and palate, but as something symbolized by H 2 O,
something from which these qualities are completely absent, it
becomes amenable to all sorts of other modes of control and
adapted to other uses. Similarly, when steam and ice are no
longer treated as what they are in their qualitative differences
from one another in direct experience, but as homogeneous
molecules moving at measured velocities through specified
distances, differential qualities that were barriers to effective
regulations, as long as they were taken as finalities, are done
away with. A single way of acting with respect to them in spite
of their differences is indicated. This mode of action is capable
of extension to other bodies, in principle to any bodies irre-
spective of qualitative differences of solid, liquid and gaseous,
provided they are given a like mathematical formulation.
Thus all sorts of modes of expansion and contraction, of
THE ARTS OF ACCEPTANCE AND CONTROL 103
refrigeration and evaporation, of production and regulation of
explosive power, become possible. From the practical stand-
point, bodies become aggregates of energies to be used in all
kinds of ways, involving all sorts of substitutions, transforma-
tions, combinations and separations. But the object of direct
or perceptible experience remains the same qualitative object,
enjoyable and usable, it always was. Water as an object of
science, as H 2 O with all the other scientific propositions which
can be made about it, is not a rival for position in real being
with the water we see and use. It is, because of experimental
operations, an added instrumentality of multiplied controls and
uses of the real things of everyday experience.
I am aware that this method of dealing with the great
problem of modern philosophy will be regarded by many as
too cavalier a disposition of a great issue ; the solution if there
be any (and many thinkers would perhaps feel any solution to
be a real deprivation) is too simple and easy to be satisfactory.
But I shall be content if the account leads anyone to recon-
sider the traditional beliefs which stand in the way of accept-
ance of the solution that is proposed. These preconceptions
are the assumption that knowledge has a uniquely privileged
position as a mode of access to reality in comparison with
other modes of experience, and that as such it is superior to
practical activity. Both of these ideas were formulated in a
period when knowing was regarded as something which could
be effected exclusively by means of the rational powers of
mind. The development of scientific inquiry with its complete
dependence upon experimentation has proved the profound
error of the latter position. Is it not time to revise the philo-
sophical conceptions which are founded on a belief now
proved to be false? The sum and substance of the present
argument is that if we frame our conception of knowledge on
the experimental model, we find that it is a way of operating
upon and with the things of ordinary experience so that we
can frame our ideas of them in terms of their interactions
io 4 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
with one another, instead of in terms of the qualities they
directly present, and that thereby our control of them, our
ability to change them and direct their changes as we desire,
is indefinitely increased. Knowing is itself a mode of practical
action and is the way of interaction by which other natural
interactions become subject to direction. Such is the significance
of the experimental method as far as we have as yet traced
its course.
As was stated at the beginning of this part of the discus-
sion, the examination of scientific knowing is undertaken not
so much for its own sake as in order to supply material for pro-
jecting a hypothesis about something less technical and of
wider and more liberal application. The ulterior issue is the
possibility that actual experience in its concrete content and
movement may furnish those ideals, meanings and values
whose lack and uncertainty in experience as actually lived by
most persons has supplied the motive force for recourse to
some reality beyond experience: a lack and uncertainty that
account for the continued hold of traditional philosophical
and religious notions which are not consonant with the main
tenor of modern life. The pattern supplied by scientific know-
ing shows that in this one field at least it is possible for
experience, in becoming genuinely experimental, to develop its
own regulative ideas and standards. Not only this, but in
addition the progress of knowledge of nature has become
secure and steady only because of this transformation. The
conclusion is a good omen for the possibility of achieving in
larger, more humane and liberal fields a similar transformation,
so that a philosophy of experience may be empirical without
either being false to actual experience or being compelled to
explain away the values dearest to the heart of man.
CHAPTER V
IDEAS AT WORK
OF ALL PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS that which concerns the nature
and worth of ideas is probably the one that most readily appeals
to any cultivated mind. The eulogistic flavour which hangs
about the word Idealism is a tribute to the respect men pay to
thought and its power. The obnoxious quality of materialism
is due to its depression of thought, which is treated as an
illusion or at most an accidental by-product ; materialism leaves
no place where ideas have creative or regulative effect. In some
sense the cause of ideas, of thought, is felt to be that of the
distinctive dignity of man himself. Serious minds have always
desired a world in which experiences would be productive of
ideas, of meanings, and in which these ideas in turn would
regulate conduct. Take away ideas and what follows from them
and man seems no better than the beasts of the field.
It is, however, an old story that philosophers have divided
into opposed schools as to the nature of ideas and their power.
To the extreme right are those who, under the banner of
Idealism, have asserted that thought is the creator of the
universe and that rational ideas constitute its structure. This
constitutive work, however, is something done once for all by
thought in a transcendental aboriginal work. The empirical
world in which we live from day by day is crass and obdurate,
stubbornly un-ideal in character because it is only an appear-
ance of the reality of which thought is the author. This
philosophic mode of paying reverence to ideas is thus com-
pensatory rather than vital. It has nothing to do with rendering
the natural and social environment of our experience a more
ideal abode, namely, one characterized by meanings which arc
the fruits of thought. There are those who would be willing
to exchange the thought which constitutes reality once for all
for that thinking which by continued particular acts renden
io6 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
our experienced world here and now more charged with
coherent and luminous meanings.
At the other pole is the school of sensational empiricists who
hold that the doctrine that thought in any mode of operation
is originative is an illusion. It proclaims the necessity of direct,
first-hand contact with things as the source of all knowledge.
Ideas are pale ghosts of flesh-and-blood impressions ; they are
images, pallid reflections, dying echoes of first-hand intercourse
with reality which takes place in sensation alone.
In spite of the polar opposition between the two schools,
they depend upon a common premise. According to both
systems of philosophy, reflective thought, thinking that involves
inference and judgment, is not originative. It has its test in
antecedent reality as that is disclosed in some non-reflective
immediate knowledge. Its validity depends upon the possibility
of checking its conclusions by identification with the terms of
such prior immediate knowledge. The controversy between the
schools is simply as to the organ and nature of previous direct
knowledge. To both schools, reflection, thought involving in-
ference, is reproductive; the "proof" of its results is found in
comparison with what is known without any inference. In
traditional empiricism the test is found in sensory impressions.
For objective idealism, reflective inquiry is valid only as it
reproduces the work previously effected by constitutive thought.
The goal of human thinking is approximation to the reality
already instituted by absolute reason. The basic premise is also
shared by realists. The essence of their position is that reflective
inquiry is valid as it terminates in apprehension of that which
already exists. When thinking introduces any modification into
antecedent reality it falls into error ; in fact, productive origina-
tion on the part of mind defines error.
The issue is connected with the analysis of experimental
knowing which was begun in the preceding chapter. For the
common premise of these philosophical schools, so opposed to
one another in most ways, goes back to adoption of the idea
IDEAS AT WORK 107
about knowledge in relation to what is independently real
which, originating in Greek thought, has become engrained in
tradition. In our summary of the characteristics of experimental
thinking, its second trait was said to be the direction of experi-
ment by ideas, the fact that experiment is not random, aimless
action, but always includes, along with groping and relatively
blind doing, an element of deliberate foresight and intent,
which determines that one operation rather than another be
tried. In this chapter we shall, accordingly, consider the
implications for the theory of ideas that follow from experi-
mental method. Let us suppose, for the time being, that all
that we can know about ideas is derived from the way in which
they figure in the reflective inquiries of science. What concep-
tion of their nature and office shall we then be led to form ?
We shall begin, somewhat abruptly, with a statement of the
nature of conceptions which has been framed on the basis of
recent conclusions in physical science. We shall then compare
this idea about ideas with that which was embodied in the
Newtonian philosophy of nature and science, and take up the
reasons which compelled the abandonment of the latter,
Finally we shall recur to a comparison of the result reached
with the doctrine embodied in traditional philosophies one
that is identical with that found in the now discredited New-
tonian natural philosophy.
The position of present science on this matter has been
stated as follows: "To find the length of an object, we have
to perform certain physical operations. The concept of length
is therefore fixed when the operations by which length is
measured are fixed ; that is, the concept of length involves as
much as and nothing more than the set of operations by which
length is determined. In general, we mean by any concept
nothing more than a set of operations ; the concept is synonymous
with the corresponding set of operations" 1 The same idea is
1 Bridgman, The Logic of Modern Physics, New York, 1927, p. 5.
The italics are in the text.
io8 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
repeated by Eddington in his Gifford Lectures. His statement
is as follows: "The vocabulary of the physicist comprises a
number of words such as length, angle, velocity, force, potential,
current, etc., which we call 'physical quantities'. It is now
recognized that these should be defined according to the way
in which we recognize them when actually confronted with
them, and not according to the metaphysical significance
which we may have anticipated for them. In the old text-books
mass was defined as 'quantity of matter'; but when it came to
an actual determination of mass, an experimental method was
prescribed which had no bearing on this definition." 1 The
adoption of this point of view with respect to the meaning and
content of thinking, and as to the validity or soundness of the
ideas by means of which we understand natural events, makes
possible what has been lacking throughout the history of
thought, a genuinely experimental empiricism. The phrase
"experimental empiricism" sounds redundant. It ought to be
so in fact, since the adjective and the noun should have the
1 The Nature of the Physical World y London and New York, 1928,
p. 255. It is implied in the quotation that concepts are recognized by
means of the experimental operations by which they are determined ;
/that is, operations define and test the validity of the meanings by which
/we state natural happenings. This implication is made explicit a few
sentences further along, when in speaking of Einstein Mr. Eddington
says his theory * 'insists that each physical quantity should be defined
as the result of certain operations of measurement and calculation'*.
The principle is anticipated in Peirce's essay on How to Make Our
Ideas Clear, published as far back as 1881 now reprinted in a volume
of essays, edited by Morris R. Cohen, and entitled Chance, Love and
Logic, New York, 1923. Peirce states that the sole meaning of the idea
of an object consists of the consequences which result when the object
is acted upon in a particular way. The principle is one element in the
pragmatism of James. The idea is also akin to the "instrumental"
theory of conceptions, according to which they are intellectual instru-
ments for directing our activities in relation to existence. The principle
of "extensive abstraction" as a mode of defining things is similar in
import. On account of ambiguities in the notion of pragmatism
although its logical import is identical I shall follow Bridgman in
speaking of "operational thinking".
IDEAS AT WORK 109
same significance, so that nothing is gained by using the two
terms. But historically such is not the case. For, historically,
empirical philosophies have been framed in terms of sensations
or sense data. These have been said to be the material out of
which ideas are framed and by agreement with which they are
to be tested. Sensory qualities are the antecedent models with
which ideas must agree if they are to be sound or "proved". 1
These doctrines have always evoked an abundance of criticisms.
But the criticisms have taken the form of depreciating the
capacity of * 'experience" to provide the source and test of our
fundamentally important ideas in either knowledge or morals.
They have used the weaknesses of sensational empiricism to
reinforce the notion that ideas are framed by reason apart from
any experience whatsoever; to support what is known in the
vocabulary of philosophical systems as an a priori rationalism.
From the standpoint of the operational definition and tests
of ideas, ideas have an empirical origin and status. But it is
that of acts performed, acts in the literal and existential sense
of the word, deeds done, not reception of sensations forced on
us from without. Sensory qualities are important. But they are
intellectually significant only as consequences of acts intention-
ally performed. A colour seen at a particular locus in a spectral
band is, for example, of immense intellectual importance in
chemistry and in astro-physics. But merely as seen, as a bare
sensory quality, it is the same for the clodhopper and the
scientist; in either case, it is the product of a direct sensory
excitation; it is just and only another colour the eye has
happened upon. To suppose that its cognitive value can be
eked out or supplied by associating it with other sensory
qualities of the same nature as itself, is like supposing that by
1 The whole empirical logic of Mill professedly, and as far as
consistent with itself, is an endeavour to show that all propositions
involving reflection and ideas must be proved, or demonstrated to be
true, by reduction to propositions consisting only of material directly
given in sensation.
no THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
putting a pile of sand in the eye we can get rid of the irritation
caused by a single grain. To suppose, on the other hand, that
we must appeal to a synthetic activity of an independent
thought to give the quality meaning in and for knowledge, is
like supposing that by thinking in our heads we can convert a
pile of bricks into a building. Thinking, carried on inside the
head, can make some headway in forming the plan of a building.
But it takes actual operations to which the plan, as the fruit of
thought, gives instrumental guidance to make a building out
of separate bricks, or to transform an isolated sensory quality
into a significant clue to knowledge of nature.
Sensory qualities experienced through vision have their
cognitive status and office, not (as sensational empiricism holds)
in and of themselves in isolation, or as merely forced upon
attention, but because they are the consequences of definite
and intentionally performed operations. Only in connection
with the intent, or idea, of these operations do they amount to
anything, either as disclosing any fact or giving test and proof
of any theory. The rationalist school was right in as far as it
insisted that sensory qualities are significant for knowledge
only when connected by means of ideas. But they were wrong
in locating the connecting ideas in intellect apart from experi-
ence. Connection is instituted through operations which define
ideas, and operations are as much matters of experience as are
sensory qualities.
It is not too much to say, therefore, that for the first time
there is made possible an empirical theory of ideas free from
the burdens imposed alike by sensationalism and a priori
rationalism. This accomplishment is, I make bold to say, one
of three or four outstanding feats of intellectual history. For it
emancipates us from the supposed need of always harking back
to what has already been given, something had by alleged
direct or immediate knowledge in the past, for the test of the
value of ideas. A definition of the nature of ideas in terms of
IDEAS AT WORK in
ideas by _the consequence^ these operations establishes con-
nectivity within concrete experience. At the same time, by
emancipation of thinking from the necessity of testing its
conclusions solely by reference to antecedent existence it makes
clear the originative possibilities of thinking.
John Locke has always been the central figure in the empirical
school. With extraordinary thoroughness he laid the foundations
of that empirical logic which tests the validity of every belief
about natural existence by the possibility of resolving the con-
tent of the belief into simple ideas originally received through
the senses. If we want to know what "solidity" or any other
idea is, we are, in his own words, "sent to the senses". In
developing this theory of the origin and test of our natural
knowledge (for he excepted mathematical and moral ideas) he
found himself building upon the foundation laid by his illus-
trious contemporary, Sir Isaac Newton. The latter was con-
vinced of the unsoundness of the rationalistic philosophy of
science represented by Descartes, for a time the great rival of
Newton for supremacy in the scientific world. Newton's own
use of mathematics and also his conception of gravitation (with
some other of his physical ideas) exposed him, however, to the
charge of reviving the "occult essences" of scholasticism.
Accordingly, he was very emphatic upon the point that he was
thoroughly empirical in premises, method and conclusions;
empirical in that he had gone to his senses and taken what he
found there as the origin and justification of his primary
scientific ideas about nature. As we shall see, certain assump-
tions of Newton were in fact far from empirical in any experi-
mental sense of that word, but were introduced by him into
the philosophical foundations of natural science and were
thence taken over into the whole philosophic theory of science
to be questioned only in our own day.
No saying of Newton's is more widely known than that "I
do not invent hypotheses". This is only his negative way of
asserting complete reliance upon a subject-matter guaranteed
ii2 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
by the senses which in turn signifies, as we have just said,
that all scientific ideas go back to sense-perceptions previously
had for both their origin and their warrant. We shall consider
first the effect of Newton's procedure upon the supposed
foundations of natural science, and then consider how the
recognition of an operational and relational definition of
scientific conceptions instead of a discrete and sensory one has
destroyed those foundations.
While Newton employed mathematical conceptions with a
freedom equal to that of Descartes and with a heuristic power
far exceeding Descartes, he differentiated his own method
from that of the latter by insisting that the objects to which
his mathematical calculations applied were not products of
thought, but were given, as far as the properties which figured
in his science were concerned, in sense. That is, he did not claim
that he could sensibly observe the ultimate particles or atoms
which were the foundation of his system, but he did claim
that he had sensible grounds for assuming their existence, and
especially he insisted that all the properties with which his
scientific theory endowed these particles were derived from and
were verifiable in direct sense-perception. In his own words:
"Whatever is not derived from phenomena is to be called a
hypothesis, and hypotheses . . . have no place in experimental
philosophy." The positive counterpart of this negative state-
ment is as follows: "The qualities of bodies which admit of
neither intension nor remission of degree and which are
found to belong to all bodies within the reach of experi-
ments, are to be assumed the universal qualities of all bodies
whatsoever."
Newton's assumption that he was only extending to the
ultimate proper objects of physical science those qualities of
experienced objects that are disclosed in direct perception is
made evident by such passages as the following: "We no other
way know the extension of bodies than by our senses, nor do
these reach it in all bodies. But because we perceive extension
IDEAS AT WORK 113
in all bodies that are sensible, therefore we ascribe it universally
to all others also. That abundance of bodies are hard, we learn
by experience; and because the hardness of the whole arises
from the hardness of the parts, we therefore justly infer the
hardness of the undivided particles not only of the bodies we
feel but of all others. That all bodies are impenetrable we
gather not from reason but from sensation. . . . That all
bodies are movable and are endued with certain powers (which
we call the vires inertiae) of persevering in their motion or in
their rest we only infer from like properties observed in the
bodies that we have seen/' Or as Newton says of his "prin-
ciples", summing it all up: "I consider them not as occult
qualities but as general laws of nature . . . their truth appear-
ing to us by phenomena" The principles in question were
mass, gravity, hardness, impenetrability, extension, motion,
inertia, etc.
The essential point of his argument is that non-sensible
bodies, namely, the ultimate particles to which mathematical
reasoning applies, are endowed with no properties save those
which are found by experience to belong to all bodies of which
we do have sensible experience. The static (spatial extension,
volume) qualities, and the dynamic properties (resistance, per-
severance in motion) of ultimate physical realities, are homo-
geneous with the common qualities of sensibly perceived
things. Colour, sound, heat, odour, etc., go out, since they
permit of absence, and of remission and increase of degrees or
are not universally present. Volume, mass, inertia, motion and
movability, remain as universal qualities. What would happen
if some raised the objection that the existence of the ultimate
particles is hypothetical, since they are not observed? What
becomes of his empiricism even if the properties ascribed to
particles are all sensibly verified, provided the bearers of these
properties are not observed ? It can hardly be said that Newton
explicitly discusses this question. It seemed to him practically
self-evident that since sensible bodies were divisible without
H
H4 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
losing the properties that form his "principles", we are entitled
to assume the existence of certain last particles of the same
kind incapable of further division. And while, in logical con-
sistency, he could hardly have admitted the argument, the fact
that he found that he could "explain" actual occurrences on
the basis of this assumption seemed to give him ample confirma-
tion of their existence. Perhaps in the following passage he
comes as near as anywhere to dealing explicitly with the point.
After saying that if all particles, all bodies whatever, were
capable of being broken, they would then wear away, he goes
on to say that in that case the "nature of things depending on
them would be changed", and adds "and therefore that nature
may be lasting, the changes of corporeal things are to be placed
only in the various separations and new associations and motions
of these permanent particles". "So that nature may be lasting !"
It would be hard to find a franker statement of the motive which
controlled Newton's doctrine. There was needed some guar-
antee that Nature would not go to pieces and be dissipated or
revert to chaos. How could the unity of anything be secure
unless there was something persistent and unchanging behind
all change? Without such fixed indissoluble unities, no final
certainty was possible. Everything was put in peril of dissolu-
tion. These metaphysical fears rather than any experimental
evidence determined the nature of the fundamental assump-
tions of Newton regarding atoms. They furnished the premises
which he regarded as scientific and as the very foundations of
the possibility of science. "All changes are to be placed in only
the separations and new associations of permanent particles."
In this statement there is contained a professedly scientific
restatement of the old human desire for something fixed as the
warrant and object of absolute certainty. Without this fixity
knowledge was impossible. Changes are to be known by treating
them as indifferent spatial approaches and withdrawals taking
place between things that are themselves eternally the same.
Thus to establish certainty in existence and in knowledge,
IDEAS AT WORK 115
"God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard,
impenetrable particles".
It was logically inevitable that as science proceeded on its
experimental path it would sooner or later become clear that
all conceptions, all intellectual descriptions, must be formu-
lated in terms of operations, actual or imaginatively possible.
There are no conceivable ways in which the existence of ulti-
mate unchangeable substances which interact without under-
going change in themselves can be reached by means of
experimental operations. Hence they have no empirical, no
experimental standing; they are pure dialectic inventions.
They were not even necessary for application of the mathe-
matical method of Newton. Most of his analytic work in his
Principles would remain unchanged if his physical particles
were dropped out and geometrical points were substituted.
What reason can be assigned for Newton's desertion of an
experimental method and for the adoption in its stead of an
obviously dialectical conception? since the conception that
the permanence of nature depends upon the assumption of a
plurality of discrete immutable substances is clearly dialectical.
Doubtless in part the reason was that the scheme worked or
seemed to work. Without developing or acknowledging the
consequences of this mode of justification, objections based
on theory could always be met by pointing to the marvellous
conclusions of physical inquiry.
But a more fundamental reason was that the minds of men,
including physical inquirers, were still possessed by the old
notion that reality in order to be solid and firm must consist
of those fixed immutable things which philosophy calls sub-
stances. Changes could be known only if they could be somehow
reduced to recombinations of original unchanging things. For
these alone can be objects of certainty the changing is as such
the uncertain and only the certain and exact is knowledge.
Thus a popular metaphysics, given rational formulation by the
Greeks, and taken over into the intellectual tradition of the
n6 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
western world, controlled at first the interpretations placed
upon the procedures and conclusions of experimental knowing.
This hypothesis as to the origin of the non-experimental
factor in the Newtonian philosophy is confirmed by his own
use of the metaphysics of the ideas of substance and essential
properties. The fact that Newton adopted the Democritean
rather than the Aristotelean conception of substance is of
course of immense importance scientifically. But philosophically
speaking it is of slight import compared with the fact that he
followed the supposed necessities of dialectic reasoning rather
than the lead of experienced subject-matter in accepting without
question the notion that there must be at the foundation of all
existence certain things which are intrinsically unchangeable,
and that such immutable entities are the objects of any true
knowledge because they give the warrant of fixed certitude.
With his acceptance of the old doctrines of substances goes
that of the doctrine of essence. If fixed unchangeable things
exist, they must have certain inherent, unchangeable proper-
ties. Changes are accidental and external; they occur between
substances and do not affect their inner nature. If they did,
substances would not be substances; they would change and
rot away. Hence, in spite of starting upon the experimental
and mathematical path, Newtonian science kept the idea that
atoms are characterized by eternal properties or qualities, that
is by essences. Substances are "solid, hard, massy, impenetrable,
movable particles". Their essence is precisely these unchange-
able, fixed qualities of solidity, mass, motion, inertia.
It thus appears that Newton retained a part of the qualitative
equipment of the objects of Greek science, in spite of their
irrelevance to both mathematics and experiment. When one
searches through philosophical commentary and discussion
(based mainly on Locke's version of Newton's results), one
finds a great deal of discussion about the fact that the so-called
secondary qualities, colour, sound, odour, taste, were eliminated
from "reality". But not a word as far as I can discover is said
IDEAS AT WORK 117
about the fact that other sensible qualities under the name of
primary were retained in defining the object of science* And
yet this retention is thefons et origo malorum. The actual fact
was that science by means of its operational conceptions was
instituting as its objects of thought things in a dimension
different from any of the direct qualities of objects. It was not a
question of getting rid of some immediate sense qualities ; but
of a treatment indifferent to any and all qualities. Newton could
not realize this fact, because he insisted that the existence of
hard and fixed unchanging substances was the basis of science.
Given such substances they had to have some qualities as their
inherent properties.
Hence Newton generously endowed them with those proper-
ties which he insisted were directly taken from sense experience
itself. Consider the consequences for subsequent thought.
Getting rid of some qualities which had been regarded as
essential to natural things while retaining others did not
forward in the least the actual work of science, while it did
work inevitably to establish a fixed gulf and opposition between
the things of ordinary perception, use and enjoyment and the
objects of science which, according to tradition, were the only
ultimately "real" objects. The story of the extent to which this
opposition became the underlying problem of modern philo-
sophy need not be retold. Nor are we called upon here to
consider the way in which it generated an "epistemological"
problem of knowledge in the general terms of relation of subject
and object, as distinct from the logical problem of the methods
by which inquiry shall attain understanding. For qualities
expelled from scientific objects were given an asylum "in the
mind"; they became mental and psychical in nature, and the
problem arose how mind composed of such elements, having
nothing in common with objects of science by doctrinal
definition the real things of nature could possibly reach ou
and know their own opposites. In another connection, that
result would provide a theme most important to discuss:
n8 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
from its origin in Berkeley's contention that since "secondary"
qualities are avowedly mental and since primary qualities cannot
be disassociated from them, the latter must be mental also,
through all the sinuosities of modern thought in dealing with
the "problem". But the first of these points, the rivalry of
scientific objects and empirical objects for position in natural
existence, has already been dealt with and the latter problem
is not immediately relevant.
We are here concerned with the Newtonian assumption that
we must carry over into the conception and definition of physical
objects some of the qualities directly experienced in sense-
perception, while their presence in such sense-experience is the
warrant or "proof" of their validity as ideas. There was no
direct experience of the ultimate massy, hard, impenetrable and
indivisible and hence unchangeable particles since indeed their
eternal permanence obviously was a thing incapable of any
experience except by some equally eternal mind. Hence these
qualities must be thought, they must be inferred. In themselves
they exist by themselves. But for us, they exist as objects of
thought only. Hence as ideas they need a warrant and justifica-
tion which primary qualities of immediate perception do not
need, since these are self- warranting according to the doctrine.
Now so deeply engrained are the conclusions of the old
tradition of rationalism versus (sensationalistic) empiricism,
that the question will still be raised : What other certification
could be given or can now be given for the properties of
scientific physical objects save by inferential extension of the
universally found properties of all objects of sense-perception ?
Is there any alternative unless we are prepared to fall back
upon a priori rational conceptions supposed to bring their own
sufficient authority with them ?
It is at this point that the recent recognition that the con-
ceptions by which we think scientific objects are derived neither
from sense nor from a priori conceptions has its logical and
philosophical force. Sense qualities, as we saw in the previous
IDEAS AT WORK 119
chapter, are something to be known, they are challenges to
knowing, setting problems for investigation. Our scientific
knowledge is something about them, resolving the problems
they propose. Inquiry proceeds by reflection, by thinking;
but not, most decidedly, by thinking as conceived in the old
tradition, as something cooped up within "mind". For experi-
mental inquiry or thinking signifies directed activity, doing
something which varies the conditions under which objects
are observed and directly had and by instituting new arrange-
ments among them. Things perceived suggest to us (originally
just evoke or stimulate) certain ways of responding to them,
of treating them. These operations have been continuously
refined and elaborated during the history of man on earth,
although it is only during the last few centuries that the whole
affair of controlled thinking and of its issue in genuine know-
ledge has been seen to be bound up with their selection and
determination.
The central question thus arises: What determines the
selection of operations to be performed? There is but one
answer: the nature of the problem to be dealt with an
answer which links the phase of experiment now under dis-
cussion with that considered in the last chapter. The first effect
of experimental analysis is, as we saw, to reduce objects directly
experienced to data. This resolution is required because the
objects in their first mode of experience are perplexing, obscure,
Fragmentary; in some way they fail to answer a need. Given
data which locate the nature of the problem, there is evoked
i thought of an operation which if put into execution may
eventuate in a situation in which the trouble or doubt which
evoked inquiry will be resolved. If one were to trace the history
3f science far enough, one would reach a time in which the
icts which dealt with a troublesome situation would be organic
esponses of a structural type together with a few acquired
labits. The most elaborate technique of present inquiry in the
aboratory is an extension and refinement of these simple
izo THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
original operations. Its development has for the most part
depended upon the utilization of physical instruments, which
when inquiry was developed to a certain point were purposely
invented. In principle, the history of the construction of
suitable operations in the scientific field is not different from
that of their evolution in industry. Something needed to be
done to accomplish an end; various devices and methods of
operation were tried. Experiences of success and failure
gradually improved the means used. More economical and
effective ways of acting were found that is, operations which
gave the desired kind of result with greater ease, less irrelevancy
and less ambiguity, greater security. Each forward step was
attended with making better tools. Often the invention of a tool
suggested operations not in mind when it was invented and thus
carried the perfecting of operations still further. There is thus
no a priori test or rule for the determination of the operations
which define ideas. They are themselves experimentally devel-
oped in the course of actual inquiries. They originated in what
men naturally do and are tested and improved in the course
of doing.
This is as far as the answer to the query can be carried in a
formal way. Consequences that successfully solve the problems
set by the conditions which give rise to the need of action
supply the basis by means of which acts, originally "naturally"
performed, become the operations of the art of scientific
experimentation. In content, a much more detailed answer can
be given. For this answer, one would turn to the historical
development of science, in which is recorded what kind of
operations have definitely been found to effect the transforma-
tion of the obscure and perplexing situations of experience into
clear and resolved situations. To go into this matter would be
to expound the character of the concepts actually employed in
the best developed branches of reflection or inquiry.
While such a discussion is apart from our purpose, there
is one common character of all such scientific operations which
IDEAS AT WORK 121
it is necessary to note. They are such as disclose relationships. A
simple case is the operation by which length is defined by one
object placed end upon end upon another object so many times.
This type of operation, repeated under conditions themselves
defined by specified operations, not merely fixes the relation of
two things to each other called their length, but defines a
generalized concept of length. This conception in connection
with other operations, such as those which define mass and
time, become instruments by means of which a multitude of
relations between bodies can be established. Thus the concep-
tions which define units of measurement of space, time and
motion become the intellectual instrumentalities by which all
sorts of things with no qualitative similarity with one another
can be compared and brought within the same system. To the
original gross experience of things there is superadded another
type of experience, the product of deliberate art, of which
relations rather than qualities are the significant subject-matter.
These connections are as much experienced as are the qualita-
tively diverse and irreducible objects of original natural
experiences.
Qualities present themselves as just what they are, statically
demarcated from one another. Moreover, they rarely change,
when left to themselves, in such ways as to indicate the inter-
actions or relations upon which their occurrence depends. No
one ever observed the production of the thing having the
properties of water, nor the mode of generation of a flash of
lightning. In sensory perception the qualities are either too
static or too abruptly discrete to manifest the specific connec-
tions that are involved in their coming into existence. Inten-
tional variation of conditions gives an idea of these connections.
Through thought of them the things are understood or truly
known. Only slowly, however, did there dawn the full import
of the scientific method. For a long time the definitions were
supposed to be made not in terms of relations but through
certain properties of antecedent things. The space, time and
122 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
motion of physics were treated as inherent properties of Being,
instead of as abstracted relations. In fact, two phases of inquiry
accompany each other and correspond to each other. In one
of these phases, everything in qualitative objects except their
happening is ignored, attention being paid to qualities only as
signs of the nature of the particular happening in question :
that is, objects are treated as events. In the other phase, the aim
of inquiry is to correlate events with one another. Scientific
conceptions of space, time and motion constitute the generalized
system of these correlations of events. Thus they are doubly
dependent upon operations of experimental art: upon those
which treat qualitative objects as events, and upon those which
connect events thus determined with one another.
In these statements we have, however, anticipated the actual
movement of scientific thought. This took a long time to arrive
at recognition of its own import. Till our own day, scientific
conceptions were interpreted in the light of the old belief that
conceptions to be valid must correspond to antecedent intrinsic
properties resident in objects dealt with. Certain properties
regarded by Newton as inherent in substances and essential
to them, in independence of connectivity, were indeed speedily
seen to be relations. This conversion happened first as to
hardness and impenetrability, which were seen to be reducible
to mass. Vis inertiae was a measure of mass. By careful thinkers
"force" was treated as a measure of acceleration and so a name
for a relation, not as an inherent property of an isolated thing
by virtue of which one thing could compel another to change.
Nevertheless, until the promulgation of Einstein's restricted
theory of relativity, mass, time and motion were regarded
as intrinsic properties of ultimate fixed and independent
substances.
We shall postpone till later consideration of the circum-
stances attending the change. We are here concerned with the
fact that when it took place it was, in spite of its upsetting
effects upon the foundation of the Newtonian philosophy of
IDEAS AT WORK 123
science and of nature, from the logical point of view only a
clear acknowledgment of what had all the time been the
moving principle of the development of scientific method. To
say this is not to disparage the scientific importance of the
discovery that mass varies with velocity and of the result of
the Michelson-Morley experiment on the velocity of light.
Such discoveries were doubtless necessary in order to force
recognition of the operational or relational character of scientific
conceptions. And yet, logically, the way in which space, time
and motion, with their various functions, appear in mathe-
matical equations and are translated into equivalent formulations
with respect to one another something which is impossible for
qualities as such indicates that a relational treatment had
always been involved. But the imagination of men had become
used to ideas framed on the pattern of large masses and relatively
slow velocities. It required observation of changes of high
velocity, as of light over great distances, and of minute changes
occurring at infinitesimal distances to emancipate imagination
from its acquired habitudes. The discovery that mass varies
with velocity did away with the possibility of continuing to
suppose that mass is the defining characteristic of things in
isolation from one another such isolation being the sole
condition under which mass could be regarded as immutable
or fixed.
The difference made in the actual content of scientific
theory is of course enormous. Yet it is not so great as the
difference made in the logic of scientific knowledge, nor as in
philosophy. With the surrender of unchangeable substances
having properties fixed in isolation and unaffected by inter-
actions, must go the notion that certainty is attained by attach-
ment to fixed objects with fixed characters. For not only are
no such objects found to exist, but the very nature of experi-
mental method, namely, definition by operations that are
interactions, implies that such things are not capable of being
known. Henceforth the quest for certainty becomes the search
124 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
for methods $f control; that is, regulation of conditions of
change with respect to their consequences.
Theoretical certitude is assimilated to practical certainty;
to security, trustworthiness of instrumental operations. "Real"
things may be as transitory as you please or as lasting in time
as you please; these are specific differences like that between
a flash of lightning and the history of a mountain range. In
any case they are for knowledge "events'* not substances. What
knowledge is interested in is the correlation among these
changes or events which means in effect that the event called
the mountain range must be placed within a system consisting
of a vast multitude of included events. When these correlations
are discovered, the possibility of control is in our hands.
Scientific objects as statements of these inter-relations are
instrumentalities of control. They are objects of the thought of
reality, not disclosures of immanent properties of real sub-
stances. They are in particular the thought of reality from a
particular point of view : the most highly generalized view of
nature as a system^of interconnected changes.
Certain important conclusions follow. The test of the
validity of ideas undergoes a radical transformation. In the
Newtonian scheme, as in the classic tradition, this test resided
in properties belonging to ultimate real objects in isolation
from one another, and hence fixed or unchanging. According
to experimental inquiry, the validity of the object of thought
depends upon the consequences of the operations which define
the object of thought. For example, colours are conceived in
terms of certain numbers. The conceptions are valid in the
degree in which, by means of these numbers, we can predict
future events, and can regulate the interactions of coloured
bodies as signs of changes that take place. The numbers are
signs or clues of intensity and direction of changes going on.
The only things relevant to the question of their validity is
whether they are dependable signs. That heat is a mode of
motion does not signify that heat and cold as qualitatively
IDEAS AT WORK 125
experienced are "unreal", but that the qualitative experience
can be treated as an event measured in terms of units of velocity
of movement, involving units of position and time, so that
it can be connected with other events or changes similarly
formulated. The test of the validity of any particular intellectual
conception, measurement or enumeration is functional, its use
in making possible the institution of interactions which yield
results in control of actual experiences of observed objects.
In contrast with this fact, in the Newtonian philosophy
measurements are important because they were supposed to
disclose just how much of a certain property belonged to some
body as its own isolated and intrinsic property. Philosophically,
the effect of this view was to reduce the "reality" of objects
to just such mathematical and mechanical properties hence
the philosophical "problem" of the relation of real physical
objects to the objects of experience with their qualities and
immediate values of enjoyment and use. Mr. Eddington has
said that "the whole of our physical knowledge is based on
measures", and that "whenever we state the properties of a
body in terms of physical quantities, we are imparting the
responses of various metrical indicators to its presence, and
nothing more". 1 His graphic illustration of the physical formula-
tion of what happens when an elephant slides downhill comes
to mind. The mass of the elephant is the reading of a pointer
on a weighing scale; the slope of the hill, the reading of a
plumb-line against the divisions of a protractor; bulk, a series
of readings on the scale of a pair of calipers ; colour, readings of
a photometer for light; the duration of the slide, a series of
readings on a watch-dial, etc.
It seems almost too obvious for mention that a scientific
object consisting of a set of measurements of relations between
two qualitative objects, and itself accordingly non-qualitative,
cannot possibly be taken, or even mis-taken, for a new kind
of "real" object which is a rival to the "reality" of the ordinary
1 The Nature of the Physical World, pp. 152 and 257.
126 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
object. But so loth are we to surrender traditional conceptions
and unwilling as philosophers to surrender as unreal problems
which have long engaged attention, that even Mr. Eddington
feels called upon to reclothe these scientific measured relations
with qualities as something which "mind" mysteriously intro-
duced! Prisoners in jails are often given numbers and are
"known" by the numbers assigned. It has not yet occurred to
anyone that these numbers are the real prisoners, and that
there is always a duplicate real object ; one a number, and the
other a flesh-and-blood person, and that these two editions of
reality have to be reconciled. It is true that the numbers which
constitute by means of measurements the object of scientific
thought are not assigned so arbitrarily as those of prisoners, but
there is no difference in philosophical principle.
Incidentally, Mr. Eddington remarks in his discussion of
the metric properties of the object of thought that a knowledge
of all possible responses of a concrete thing as measured by
suitable devices "would completely determine its relation to
its environment". The relations a thing sustains are hardly a
competitor to the thing itself. Put positively, the physical
object, as scientifically defined, is not a duplicated real object,
but is a statement, as numerically definite as is possible, of the
relations between sets of changes the qualitative object sustains
with changes in other things ideally of all things with which
interaction might under any circumstances take place.
Since these correlations are what physical inquiry does
know, it is fair to conclude that they are what it intends or
means to know: on analogy with the legal maxim that any
reasonable person intends the reasonably probable consequences
of what he does. We come back again to the frequently repeated
statement that the problem which has given so much trouble to
modern philosophy that of reconciling the reality of the
physical object of science with the richly qualitative object of
ordinary experience, is a factitious one. All that is required in
order to apprehend that scientific knowledge as a mode of active
IDEAS AT WORK 127
operation is a potential ally of the modes of action which sustain
values in existence, is to surrender the traditional notion that
knowledge is possession of the inner nature of things and is the
only way in which they may be experienced as they "really" are.
Fof if one change is correlated definitely with others it can
be employed as an indication of their occurrence. Seeing one
thing happen we can promptly infer upon what it depends,
and what needs to be reinforced or to be weakened if its presence
is to be made more secure or is to be done away with. In itself,
the object is just what it is experienced as being, hard, heavy,
sweet, sonorous, agreeable or tedious and so on. But in being
"there" these traits are effects, not causes. They cannot as such
be used as means, and when they are set up as ends in view,
we are at a loss how to secure them. For just as qualities there
are no constant and definite relations which can be ascertained
between them and other things. If we wish to regard them not
as fixed properties but as things to be attained, we must be
able to look upon them as dependent events. If we wish to be
able to judge how they may be attained, we must connect them
as changes with other changes more nearly in our power, until
by means of a transitive series of connected changes we arrive
at that which we can initiate by our own acts. If one with
understanding of the whole situation were to set out to devise
means of control of the experience of qualitative values, he
would plot a course which would be identical with that followed
by experimental science ; one in which the results of knowledge
would bear the same relation to acts to be performed as do
those of actual physical knowledge.
Ability, through a definite or measured correlation of
changes, to connect one with another as sign or evidence is
the precondition of control. It does not of itself provide direct
control; reading the index hand of a barometer as a sign of
probable rain does not enable us to stop the coming of the
rain. But it does enable us to change our relations to it: to
plant a garden, to carry an umbrella on going out, to direct
I 2 8 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
the course of a vessel at sea, etc. It enables preparatory acts
to be undertaken which make values less insecure. If it does
not enable us to regulate just what is to take place, it enables
us to direct some phase of it in a way which influences the
stability of purposes and results. In other cases, as in the arts
proper, we can not only modify our own attitude so as to effect
useful preparation for what is to happen, but we can modify
the happening itself. This use of one change or perceptible
occurrence as a sign of others and as a means of preparing
ourselves, did not wait for the development of modern science.
It is as old as man himself, being the heart of all intelligence.
But accuracy and scope of such judgments, which are the only
means with power to direct the course of events and to effect
the security of values, depends upon the use of methods such
as modern physics has made available.
Extent of control is dependent, as was suggested a moment
ago, upon capacity to find a connected series of correlated
change, such that each linked pair leads on to another in the
direction of a terminal one which can be brought about by our
own action. It is this latter condition which is especially fulfilled
by the objects of scientific thought. Physical science disregards
the qualitative heterogeneity of experienced objects so as to
make them all members in one comprehensive homogeneous
scheme, and hence capable of translation or conversion one
into another. This homogeneity of subject-matter over a broad
range of things which are as disparate from each other in direct
experience as sound and colour, heat and light, friction and
electricity, is the source of the wide and free control of events
found in modern technology. Common-sense knowledge can
connect things as sign and thing indicated here and there by
isolated couples. But it cannot possibly join them all up together
so that we can pass from any one to any other. The homogeneity
of scientific objects, through formulation in terms of relations
of space, time and motion, is precisely the device which makes
this indefinitely broad and flexible scheme of transitions
IDEAS AT WORK 12$
possible. The meaning which one event has is translatable
into the meanings which others possess. Ideas of objects,
formulated in terms of the relations which changes bear to
one another, having common measures, institute broad, smooth
highways by means of which we can travel from the thought of
one part of nature to that of any other. In ideal at least, we can
travel from any meaning or relation found anywhere in
nature to the meaning to be expected anywhere else.
We have only to compare thinking and judging objects in
terms of these measured interactions with the classic scheme
of a hierarchy of species and genera to see the great gain that
has been effected. It is the very nature of fixed kinds to be as
exclusive with respect to those of a different order as it is to be
inclusive with respect to those which fall within the class.
Instead of a thoroughfare from one order to another, there
was a sign : No passage. The work of emancipation which was
initiated by experimentation, setting objects free from limita-
tion by old habits and customs, reducing them to a collection
of data forming a problem for inquiry, is perfected by the
method of conceiving and defining objects through opera-
tions which have as their consequence accurate metric
statements of changes correlated with changes going on else-
where.
The resolution of objects and nature as a whole into facts
stated exclusively in terms of quantities which may be handled
in calculation, such as saying that red is such a number of
changes while green is another, seems strange and puzzling
only when we fail to appreciate what it signifies. In reality, it
is a declaration that this is the effective way to think things;
the effective mode in which to frame ideas of them, to formulate
their meanings. The procedure does not vary in principle from
that by which it is stated that an article is worth so many dollars
and cents. The latter statement does not say that the article is
literally or in its ultimate "reality" so many dollars and cents;
it says that for purpose of exchange that is the way to think of
1 30 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
it, to judge it. It has many other meanings and these others are
usually more important inherently. But with respect to trade, it
is what it is worth, what it will sell for, and the price value put
upon it expresses the relation it bears to other things in
exchange. The advantage in stating its worth in terms of an
abstract measure of exchange such as money, instead of in
terms of the amount of corn, potatoes or some other special
thing it will exchange for, is that the latter method is restricted
and the former generalized. Development of the systems of
units by which to measure sensible objects (or form ideas of
them) has come along with discovery of the ways in which the
greatest amount of free movement from one conception to
another is possible.
The formulation of ideas of experienced objects in terms of
measured quantities, as these are established by an intentional
art or technique, does not say that this is the way they must
be thought, the only valid way of thinking them. It states that
for the purpose of generalized, indefinitely extensive translation
from one idea to another, this is the way to think them. The
statement is like any other statement about instruments, such
as that so-and-so is the best way of sending a number of
telegraphic dispatches simultaneously. As far as it is actually
the best instrumentality, the statement is correct. It has to be
proved by working better than any other agency; it is in process
of continuous revision and improvement. For purposes except
that of general and extensive translation of one conception into
another, it does not follow that the "scientific" way is the best
way of thinking an affair. The nearer we come to an action that
is to have an individualized unique object of experience for its
conclusion, the less do we think the things in question in these
exclusively metric terms. The physician in practice will not think
in terms as general and abstract as those of the physiologist in
the laboratory, nor the engineer in the field in those as free from
special application as will the physicist in his workshop. There
are many ways of thinking things in relation to one another;
IDEAS AT WORK 131
they are, as conceptions, instruments. The value of an instru-
ment depends upon what is to be done with it. The fine-scale
micrometer which is indispensable in the successful perform-
ance of one operation would be a hindrance in some other
needed act; and a watch-spring is useless to give elasticity to
a mattress.
There is something both ridiculous and disconcerting in the
way in which men have let themselves be imposed upon, so
as to infer that scientific ways of thinking of objects give the
inner reality of things, and that they put a mark of spuriousness
upon all other ways of thinking of them, and of perceiving and
enjoying them. It is ludicrous because these scientific concep-
tions, like other instruments, are hand-made by man in pursuit
of realization of a certain interest that of the maximum
convertibility of every object of thought into any and every
other. It is a wonderful ideal; the ingenuity which man has
shown in devising means of realizing the interest is even more
marvellous. But these ways of thinking are no more rivals of
or substitutes for objects as directly perceived and enjoyed
than the power-loom, which is a more effective instrument for
weaving cloth than was the old hand-loom, is a substitute and
rival for cloth. The man who is disappointed and tragic because
he cannot wear a loom is in reality no more ridiculous than are
the persons who feel troubled because the objects of scientific
conception of natural things have not the same uses and values
as the things of direct experience.
The disconcerting aspect of the situation resides in the
difficulty with which mankind throws off beliefs that have
become habitual. The test of ideas, of thinking generally, is
found in the consequences of the acts to which the ideas lead,
that is, in the new arrangements of things which are brought
into existence. Such is the unequivocal evidence as to the worth
of ideas which is derived from observing their position and
r61e in experimental knowing. But tradition makes the tests
of ideas to be their agreement with some antecedent state oi
1 32 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
things. This change of outlook and standard from what precedes
to what comes after, from the retrospective to the prospective,
from antecedents to consequences, is extremely hard to accom-
plish. Hence when the physical sciences describe objects and
the world as being such and such, it is thought that the descrip-
tion is of reality as it exists in itself. Since all value-traits are
lacking in objects as science presents them to us, it is assumed
that Reality has not such characteristics.
In the previous chapter, we saw that experimental method,
in reducing objects to data, divests experienced things of their
qualities, but that this removal, judged from the standpoint of
the whole operation of which it is one part, is a condition of
the control which enables us to endow the objects of experience
with other qualities which we want them to have. In like
fashion, thought, our conceptions and ideas, are designations
of operations to be performed or already performed. Conse-
quently their value is determined by the outcome of these
operations. They are sound if the operations they direct give
us the results which are required. The authority of thought
depends upon what it leads us to through directing the perform-
ance of operations. The business of thought is not to conform
to or reproduce the characters already possessed by objects
but to judge them as potentialities of what they become through
an indicated operation. This principle holds from the simplest
case to the most elaborate. To judge that this object is sweet,
that is, to refer the idea or meaning "sweet" to it without
actually experiencing sweetness, is to predict that when it is
tasted that is, subjected to a specified operation a certain
consequence will ensue. Similarly, to think of the world in
terms of mathematical formulae of space, time and motion is
not to have a picture of the independent and fixed essence of
the universe. It is to describe experienceable objects as material
upon which certain operations are performed.
The bearing of this conclusion upon the relation of knowledge
and action speaks for itself. Knowledge which is merely a
IDEAS AT WORK 133
reduplication in ideas of what exists already in the world may
afford us the satisfaction of a photograph, but that is all. To
form ideas whose worth is to be judged by what exists inde-
pendently of them is not a function that (even if the test could
be applied, which seems impossible) goes on within nature or
makes any difference there. Ideas that are plans of operations to
be performed are integral factors in actions which change the
face of the world. Idealistic philosophies have not been wrong
in attaching vast importance and power to ideas. But in isolating
their function and their test from action, they failed to grasp
the point and place where ideas have a constructive office. A
genuine idealism and one compatible with science will emerge
as soon as philosophy accepts the teaching of science that ideas
are statements not of what is or has been but of acts to be
performed. For then mankind will learn that, intellectually
(that is, save for the aesthetic enjoyment they afford, which is
of course a true value), ideas are worthless except as they pass
into actions which rearrange and reconstruct in some way, be
it little or large, the world in which we live. To magnify thought
and ideas for their own sake apart from what they do (except,
once more, aesthetically) is to refuse to learn the lesson of the
most authentic kind of knowledge the experimental and it
is to reject the idealism which involves responsibility. To praise
thinking above action because there is so much ill-considered
action in the world is to help maintain the kind of a world in
which action occurs for narrow and transient purposes. To seek
after ideas and to cling to them as means of conducting opera-
tions, as factors in practical arts, is to participate in creating a
world in which the springs of thinking will be clear and ever-
flowing. We recur to our general issue. When we take the
instance of scientific experience in its own field, we find that
experience when it is experimental does not signify the absence
of large and far-reaching ideas and purposes. It is dependent
upon them at every point. But it generates them within its own
procedures and tests them by its own operations. In so far, we
134 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
have the earnest of a possibility of human experience, in all its
phases, in which ideas and meanings will be prized and will
be continuously generated and used. But they will be integral
with the course of experience itself, not imported from the
external source of a reality beyond.
CHAPTER VI
THE PLAY OF IDEAS
THE PROBLEM OF THE nature, office and test of ideas is not
exhausted in the matter of physical conceptions we have
discussed in the preceding chapter. Mathematical ideas are
indispensable instruments of physical research, and no account
of the method of the latter is complete that does not take
into account the applicability of mathematical conceptions to
natural existence. Such ideas have always seemed to be the
very type of pure conceptions, of thought in its own nature
unadulterated with material derived from experience. To a
constant succession of philosophers, the role of mathematics
in physical analysis and formulation has seemed to be a proof
of the presence of an invariant rational element within physical
existence, which is on that account something more than
physical; this role of conceptions has been the stumbling-
block of empiricists in trying to account for science on an
empirical basis.
The significance of mathematics for philosophy is not con-
fined to this seemingly superphysical phase of the physical
world, and a superempirical factor in knowledge of it.
Mathematical conceptions as expressions of pure thought
have also seemed to provide the open gateway to a realm of
essence that is independent of existence, physical or mental
a self-subsisting realm of ideal and eternal objects which
are the objects of the highest that is, the most assured
knowledge. As was earlier noted, the Euclidean geometry was
undoubtedly the pattern for the development of a formally
rational logic; it was also a marked factor in leading Plato to
his doctrine of a world of supersensible and superphysical
ideal objects. The procedure of mathematics has, moreover,
always been the chief reliance of those who have asserted that
the demonstrated validity of all reflective thinking depends
136 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
upon rational truths immediately known without any element
of inference entering in. For mathematics was supposed to
rest upon a basis of first truths or axioms, self-evident in
nature, and needing only that the eye of reason should fall
upon them to be recognized for what they are. The function
of indemonstrables, of axioms and definitions, in mathematical
deduction has been the ground for the distinct : on between
intuitive and discursive reason, just as deductions have been
taken to be the convincing proof that there is a realm of pure
essences logically connected with one another: universals
having internal bonds with one another.
The theory that conceptions are definitions of consequences
of operations needs therefore to be developed with reference
to mathematical ideas both for its own sake and for its bearing
upon the philosophic issues which are basic to the logic of
rationalism and to the metaphysics of essences and universals
or invariants. We shall begin with mathematical concepts
in their physical sense, and then consider them as they
are developed apart from existential application. Although
Descartes defined natural existence as extension, the classic
tradition that only sense and imagination, among the organs
of mind, refer to physical existence caused him to feel bound
to offer justification for the doctrine that natural phenomena
can be scientifically stated by purely mathematical reasoning
without need of recourse to experimentation. His proof of
the existence of God served the purpose of justifying this
application of mathematical conceptions in physics. With
Spinoza, the correspondence between physical existence and
ideas did not need to be substantiated by God because it was
God. This correspondence when modified to give thought
such a priority as to include existence within itself became
the animating motif of Post-Kantian idealistic systems.
Newton, being a man of science rather than a professed
philosopher, made such assumptions as he thought scientific
procedure demanded and its conclusions warranted. The
THE PLAY OF IDEAS 137
scepticism of Hume (anticipated, however, by Berkeley as
far as the Newtonian metaphysics of mathematical space and
time were concerned) was, as is notorious, the chief factor in
leading Kant to regard space and time as a priori forms of
all perceptual experience. One of the grounds for Kant's
conviction that his doctrine was incon trovertible was because
he thought it had the support of Newtonian physics and was
necessary to give that physics a firm foundation.
The consideration important for our special purpose is,
however, the fact that Newton with respect to the doctrine of
space, time and motion (involved in all conception of things
dealt with in the universal physics of nature) frankly deserted
the empirical method he professed to use in respect to the
properties of the ultimate fixed substances. At the same time,
he regarded the physical and the mathematical as comple-
mentary conceptions of two sets of properties of fixed forms of
immutable Being. He assumed, in addition to atoms having
mass, inertia and extension, the existence of empty immaterial
space and time in which these substances lived, moved and
had their being. The combination of the properties of these two
kinds of Being provided the union of the empirically observed
properties of phenomena with those that were rational and
mathematical: a union so complete and so intimate that it
conferred upon the Newtonian system that massive solidity
and comprehensiveness which seemed to render his system
in its essential framework the last word possible of the science
of nature.
Definition of space, time and motion from "the relation
they bear to sense" is according to him "a vulgar prejudice".
As well as any contemporary physicist, he knew that pheno-
mena of space, time and motion in their perceived forms are
found in a frame of reference which is relative to an observer.
In escape from the relativity of observable traits of the spatial
and temporal motions of bodies, he assumed the existence of
a fixed container of empty space in which bodies are located and
138 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
an equably flowing time, empty in itself, in which changes
take place. From this assumption, it followed that atoms have
an intrinsically measurable motion of their own, independent
of any connection with an observer. Absolute space, time and
motion were thus the immutable frame within which all
particular phenomena take place.
The assumption of these rational absolutes was also required
by his basic metaphysics of fixed substances having their own
inherent and unchangeable (or essential) properties of mass,
extension and inertia. The sole ground of assurance that
ultimate hard and massy particles persist without internal
change, that all changes are merely matters of their external
"separations and associations", was the existence of something
empty and fixed within which the latter occur. Without such
an intervening medium, interaction with one another would
be equivalent to internal changes in atoms. Space provided
the condition under which changes would be external and
indifferent to ultimate physical substances. Since, then, changes
have nothing to do directly with the relations of atoms to one
another, the temporal order of changes cannot be connected
with the atoms themselves. There must be some evenly flowing
external change in reality no change at all in reference to
which they have fixed positions of before and after and of
simultaneity. Since velocity and acceleration of observed
motions would be disjoined from absolute position and date
if they were relative to an observer to the disruption of the
whole physical scheme motion must also be absolute.
While professing empiricism, Newton thus got the benefit
of the rationalistic system of strict deductive necessity.
Invariant time, space and motion furnished phenomena those
properties to which mathematical reasoning could be attached
as a disclosure of inherent properties. The positions of bodies
could be treated as an assemblage of geometrical points and
the temporal properties of their motions be considered as if
they were mere instants. Everything observed had, in its
THE PLAY OF IDEAS 139
scientific treatment, to conform mathematically to specifications
laid down by the mathematics of space and time. Until our own
day, until the conception of the determination of simultaneity
of occurrence was challenged by Einstein, the system continued
to receive at least Pickwickian assent from scientists.
There is no trouble of course about the determination of
simultaneity when two events occur within one and the same
region of observation. Newton, because of his assumption of
absolute time, assumed that the measurement of simultaneity
had precise meaning for events not occurring within the same
observed field. Einstein saw that this assumption was the
Achilles heel of the entire scheme. He demanded an
experimental method of determining simultaneity without
which events cannot be dated with respect to one another.
He made the demand not on purely general principles, but
because of a definite problem with relation to the velocity of
light. For the existing state of the doctrine of light presented
a discrepancy not to be resolved on the basis of the received
scheme. The observed constancy of light with reference to the
place from which its direction was observed and its velocity
measured, did not agree with a fundamental principle of
dynamics; with its postulate concerning frames of reference
for co-ordinate systems having uniform movements of trans-
lation. Instead of maintaining the old theory and denying
the validity of the observed result of the Michelson-Morley
experiment, Einstein asked what change in conceptions was
demanded by the experimental result. He saw that the
measurement of time relations, centring in the concept of
simultaneity, was the crucial point.
So he said, "We require a definition of simultaneity such
that this definition supplies us with a method by which in
particular cases the physicist can decide by experiment whether
or not two events occurred simultaneously". 1 He suggested an
arrangement by which two flashes of light, not in themselves
1 Einstein, Relativity, New York, 1926, p. 26. Italics not in original.
i 4 o THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
capable of inclusion in one region of observation, be reflected
to a mirror placed midway between the origin of the two
flashes. They are simultaneous if they are then included
within one and the same act of observation. To a layman,
the suggestion might seem innocuous. But taken in its context,
it signified that the temporal relation of events was to be
measured by means of the consequences of an operation
which constitutes as its outcome a single field of observed
phenomena. It signified, in connection with the fact regarding
the constancy of velocity of light, that events occurring at
different times according to two watches keeping exactly the
same time, placed at the points of the origin of the flashes,
may be simultaneous. In scientific content, this was equivalent
to doing away with Newton's absolutes; it was the source of
the doctrine of restricted relativity. It signified that local or
individualized times are not the same as a generic common
time of physics: in short, it signified that physical time
designates a relation of events, not the inherent property of
objects.
What is significant for our purpose is that it marked the
end, as far as natural science is concerned, of the attempt to
frame scientific conceptions of objects in terms of properties
assigned to those objects independently of the observed con-
sequences of an experimental operation. Since the former
doctrine about the proper way to form conceptions, to the
effect that agreement with antecedent properties determines
the value or validity of ideas, was the doctrine common to
all philosophic schools except the pragmatic one of Peirce
the logical and philosophical transformation thus effected may
be said to be more far-reaching than even the extraordinary
development in the content of natural science which resulted.
It is not too much to say that whatever should be future
developments in discoveries about light, or that even if the
details of the Einstein theory of relativity should be some
time discredited, a genuine revolution, and one which will
THE PLAY OF IDEAS 141
not go backward, has been effected in the theory of the origin,
nature and test of scientific ideas.
In respect to the special theme of the nature of mathematico-
physical conceptions, the pertinent conclusion is evident. For
the conclusion of Einstein, in eliminating absolute space,
time and motion as physical existences, does away with the
doctrine that statements of space, time and motion as they
appear in physics concern inherent properties. For that notion,
it compels the substitution of the notion that they designate
relations of events. As such relations, they secure, in their
generality, the possibility of linking together objects viewed
as events in a general system of linkage and translation. They
are the means of correlating observations made at different
times and places, whether by one observer or by many, so
that translations may be effected from one to another. In
short, they do the business that all thinking and objects
of thought have to effect: they connect, through relevant
operations, the discontinuities of individualized observations
and experiences into continuity with one another. Their validity
is a matter of their efficacy in performance of this function;
it is tested by results and not by correspondence with antecedent
properties of existence.
It is possible to extend this conclusion to logical forms in
general. The fact that there are certain formal conditions
of the validity of inference has been used as the ultimate
warrant of a realm of invariant Being. But in analogy with
the conclusion regarding mathematical conceptions, logical
forms are statements of the means by which it is discovered
that various inferences may be translated into one another,
or made available with respect to one another, in the widest
and most secure way. Fundamentally, the needs satisfied by
inference are not fully met as long as special instances are
isolated from one another.
The difference between the operational conception of con-
ceptions and the traditional orthodox one may be indicated by
i 4 2 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
an illustrative analogy. 1 A visitor to a country finds certain
articles used for various purposes, rugs, baskets, spears, etc.
He may be struck by the beauty, elegance and order of their
designs, and, assuming a purely aesthetic attitude toward them,
conclude that they are put to use only incidentally. He may
even suppose that their instrumental use marks a degradation
of their inherent nature, a concession to utilitarian needs and
conveniences. A "tough-minded" observer may be convinced
that they were intended to be put to use, and had been con-
structed for that purpose. He would, indeed, recognize that
there must have been raw materials which were inherently
adapted for conversion to such appliances. But he would not
on that account believe the things to be original instead of
being made articles; still less would he conceive them to be
the original "realities'* of which crude or raw material were
imitations or inadequate phenomenal exemplifications. As he
traced the history of these instrumentalities and found them
beginning in forms which were nearer to raw materials,
gradually being perfected in economy and efficiency, he would
conclude that the perfecting had been an accompaniment of
use for ends, changes being introduced to remedy deficiencies
in prior operations and results. His tender-minded companion
might, on the other hand, infer that the progressive develop-
ment showed that there was some original and transcendental
pattern which had been gradually approximated empirically,
an archetype laid up in the heavens.
One person might argue that, while the development of
designs had been a temporal process, it had been wholly
determined by patterns of order, harmony and symmetry
that have an independent subsistence, and that the historic
1 The phrase "conception of conceptions" is used to suggest that the
interpretation is self-applying: that is, the conception advanced is
also a designation of a method to be pursued. One may lead a horse to
water but cannot compel him to drink. If one is unable to perform an
indicated operation or declines to do so, he will not of course get its
meaning.
THE PLAY OF IDEAS 143
movement was simply a piecemeal approximation to eternal
patterns. He might elaborate a theory of formal coherence of
relations having nothing to do with particular objects except
that of being exemplified in them. His tough-minded companion
might retort that any object made to serve a purpose must
have a definite structure of its own which demands an internal
consistency of parts in connection with one another, and that
man-made machines are typical examples; that while these
cannot be made except by taking advantage of conditions and
relations previously existing, machines and tools are adequate
to their function in the degree in which they produce rearrange-
ment of antecedent things so that they may work better for the
need in question. If speculatively inclined, he might wonder
whether our very ideals of internal order and harmony had
not themselves been formed under the pressure of constant
need of redisposing of things so that they would serve as
means for consequences. If not too tough-minded, he would
be willing to admit that after a certain amount of internal
rearrangement and organization had been effected under the
more direct pressure of demand for effective instrumentalities,
an enjoyed perception of internal harmony on its own account
would result, and that study of formal relations might well
give a clue to methods which would result in improvement of
internal design for its own sake with no reference whatever
to special further use.
Apart from metaphor, the existence of works of fine art,
of interest in making them and of enjoyment of them, affords
sufficient evidence that objects exist which are wholly "real"
and yet are man-made; that making them must observe
or pay heed to antecedent conditions, and yet the objects
intrinsically be redispositions of prior existence; that things
as they casually offer themselves suggest ends and enjoyments
they do not adequately realize ; that these suggestions become
definite in the degree they take the form of ideas, of indications
of operations to be performed in order to effect a desired
144 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
eventual rearrangement. These objects, when once in existence,
have their own characters and relations, and as such suggest
standards and ends for further production of works of art,
with less need for recourse to original "natural" objects;
they become as it were a "realm" having its own purposes
and regulative principles. At the same time, the objects of
this "realm" tend to become over-formal, stereotyped and
"academic" if the internal development of an art is too much
isolated, so that there is recurrent need for attention to original
"natural" objects in order to initiate new significant move-
ments.
The notion that there are no alternatives with respect to
mathematical objects save that they form an independent
realm of essences ; or are relations inherent in some antecedent
physical structure denominated space and time; or else are
mere psychological, "mental" things, has no support in fact.
The supposition that these alternatives are exhaustive is a
survival of the traditional notion that identifies thought and
ideas with merely mental acts that is, those inside mind.
Products of intentional operations are objectively real and are
valid if they meet the conditions involved in the intent for
the sake of which they are constructed. But human interaction
is a contributing factor in their production, and they have
worth in the human use made of them.
The discussion so far does not, however, directly touch the
question of "pure" mathematics, mathematical ideas in them-
selves. Newton's mathematics was professedly a mathematics
of physical although non-material existence: of existential
absolute space, time and motion. Mathematicians, however,
often regard their distinctive conceptions as non-existential in
any sense. The whole tendency of later developments, which
it is unnecessary for our purposes to specify (but of which the
doctrine of w-dimensional "spaces" is typical), is to identify
pure mathematics with pure logic. Some philosophers employ
therefore the entities of pure mathematics so as to rehabilitate
THE PLAY OF IDEAS 145
the Platonic notion of a realm of essence wholly independent
of all existence whatever.
Does the doctrine of the operational and experimentally
empirical nature of conceptions break down when applied to
"pure" mathematical objects? The key to the answer is to be
found in a distinction between operations overtly performed
(or imagined to be performed) and operations symbolically
executed. When we act overtly, consequences ensue; if we do
not like them, they are nevertheless there in existence. We
are entangled in the outcome of what we do ; we have to stand
its consequences. We shall put a question that is so elementary
that it may seem silly. How can we have an end in view
without having an end, an existential result, in fact? With
the answer to this question is bound up the whole problem
of intentional regulation of what occurs. For unless we can
have ends-in-view without experiencing them in concrete fact
no regulation of action is possible. The question might be put
thus : How can we act without acting, without doing something ?
If, by a contradiction in terms, it had been possible for
men to think of this question before they had found how to
answer it, it would have been given up as insoluble. How can
man make an anticipatory projection of the outcome of an
activity in such a way as to direct the performance of an act
which shall secure or avert that outcome? The solution must
have been hit upon accidentally as a by-product, and then
employed intentionally. It is natural to suppose that it came
as a product of social life by way of communication; say,
of cries that having once directed activities usefully without
intent were afterwards used expressly for that purpose. But
whatever the origin, a solution was found when symbols came
into existence. By means of symbols, whether gestures, words
or more elaborate constructions, we act without acting. That
is, we perform experiments by means of symbols which have
results which are themselves only symbolized, and which do
not therefore commit us to actual or existential consequences.
K
146 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
If a man starts a fire or insults a rival, effects follow; the die
is cast. But if he rehearses the act in symbols in privacy, he
can anticipate and appreciate its result. Then he can act or not
act overtly on the basis of what is anticipated and is not there
in fact. The invention or discovery of symbols is doubtless by
far the single greatest event in the history of man. Without
them, no intellectual advance is possible; with them, there is
no limit set to intellectual development except inherent stupidity.
For long ages, symbols were doubtless used to regulate
activity only ad hoc\ they were employed incidentally and
for some fairly immediate end. Moreover, the symbols used
at first were not examined nor settled upon with respect to
the office they performed. They were picked up in a casual
manner from what was conveniently at hand. They carried
all sorts of irrelevant associations that hampered their efficacy
in their own special work. They were neither whittled down
to accomplish a single function nor were they of a character
to direct acts to meet a variety of situations: they were
neither definite nor comprehensive. Definition and generalization
are incompetent without invention of proper symbols. The
loose and restricted character of popular thinking has its origin
in these facts; its progress is encumbered by the vague and
vacillating nature of ordinary words. Thus the second great
step forward was made when special symbols were devised
that were emancipated from the load of irrelevancy carried
by words developed for social rather than for intellectual
purposes, their meaning being helped out by their immediate
local context. This liberation from accidental accretions
changed clumsy and ambiguous instruments of thought into
sharp and precise tools. Even more important was the fact
that instead of being adapted to local and directly present
situations, they were framed in detachment from direct overt
use and with respect to one another. One has only to look
at mathematical symbols to note that the operations they
designate are others of the same kind as themselves, that is,
THE PLAY OF IDEAS 147
symbolic not actual. The invention of technical symbols
marked the possibility of an advance of thinking from the
commor-sense level to the scientific.
The formation of geometry by the Greeks is probably
that which historically best illustrates the transition. Before
this episode, counting and measuring had been employed for
"practical" ends, that is, for uses directly involved in nearby
situations. They were restricted to particular purposes. Yet
having been invented and having found expression in definite
symbols, they formed, as far as they went, a subject-matter
capable of independent examination. New operations could be
performed upon them. They could, and in no disrespectful
sense, be played with; they could be treated from the stand-
point of a fine art rather than from that of an immediately
useful economic craft. The Greeks with their dominant aesthetic
interest were the ones who took this step. Of the creation by
the Greeks of geometry it has been said that it was stimulated
"by the art of designing, guided by an aesthetic application
of symmetrical figures. The study of such figures, and the
experimental construction of tile figures, decorative borders,
conventional sculptures, mouldings and the like had made the
early Greeks acquainted not only with a great variety of
regular geometrical forms, but with techniques by which they
could be constructed, compounded and divided exactly, in
various ways. Unlike their predecessors, the Greeks made
an intellectual diversion of all they undertook." Having dis-
covered by trial and error a large number of interrelated
properties of figures, they proceeded to correlate these with
one another and with new ones. They effected this work "in
ways which gradually eliminated from their thought about
them all guesswork, all accidental experiences such as errors
of actual drawing and measurement, and all ideas except those
which were absolutely essential. Their science thus became a
science of ideas exclusively. " x
1 Barry, The Scientific Habit of Thought, New York, 1927, pp. 212-213.
I 4 8 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
The importance of the intellectual transition from concrete
to abstract is generally recognized. But it is often miscon-
ceived. It is not infrequently regarded as if it signified simply
the selection by discriminative attention of some one quality
or relation from a total object already sensibly present or
present in memory. In fact, it marks a change in dimensions.
Things are concrete to us in the degree in which they are
either means directly used or are ends directly appropriated
and enjoyed. Mathematical ideas were "concrete" when they
were employed exclusively for building bins for grain or
measuring land, selling goods, or aiding a pilot in guiding
his ship. They became abstract when they were freed from
connection with any particular existential application and use.
This happened when operations made possible by symbols
were performed exclusively with reference to facilitating and
directing other operations also symbolic in nature. It is one
kind of thing, a concrete one, to measure the area of a triangle
so as to measure a piece of land, and another kind an abstract
one to measure it simply as a means of measuring other areas
symbolically designated. The latter type of operation makes
possible a system of conceptions related together as conceptions ;
it thus prepares the way for formal logic.
Abstraction from use in special and direct situations was
coincident with the formation of a science of ideas, of meanings,
whose relations to one another rather than to things was the
goal of thought. It is a process, however, which is subject to
interpretation by a fallacy. Independence from any specified
application is readily taken to be equivalent to independence
from application as such; it is as if specialists, engaged in
perfecting tools and having no concern with their use and
so interested in the operation of perfecting that they carry
results beyond any existing possibilities of use, were to argue
that therefore they are dealing with an independent realm
having no connection with tools or utilities. This fallacy is
especially easy to fall into on the part of intellectual specialists.
THE PLAY OF IDEAS 149
It played its part in the generation of a priori rationalism.
It is the origin of that idolatrous attitude toward universals
so often recurring in the history of thought. Those who handle
ideas through symbols as if they were things for ideas are
objects of thought and trace their mutual relations in all
kinds of intricate and unexpected relationships, are ready
victims to thinking of these objects as if they had no sort of
reference to things, to existence.
In fact, the distinction is one between operations to be actually
performed and possible operations as such, as merely possible.
Shift of reflection to development of possible operations in
their logical relations to one another opens up opportunities
for operations that would never be directly suggested. But its
origin and eventual meaning lie in acts that deal with concrete
situations. As to origin in overt operations there can be no
doubt. Operations of keeping tally and scoring are found in
both work and games. No complex development of the latter
is possible without such acts and their appropriate symbols.
These acts are the originals of number and of all develop-
ments of number. There are many arts in which the operations
of enumeration characteristic of keeping tally are explicitly
used for measuring. Carpentry and masonry for example cannot
go far without some device, however rude, for estimating size
and bulk. If we generalize what happens in such instances,
we see that the indispensable need is that of adjusting things
as means, as resources, to other things as ends.
The origin of counting and measuring is in economy and
efficiency of such adjustments. Their results are expressed by
physical means, at first notches, scratches, tying knots; later
by figures and diagrams. It is easy to find at least three types
of situations in which this adjustment of means to ends is
a practical necessity. There is the case of allotment or dis-
tribution of materials; of accumulation of stores against
anticipated days of need; of exchange of things in which
there is a surplus for things in which there is a deficit. The
i 5 o THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
fundamental mathematical conceptions of equivalence, serial
order, sum and unitary parts, of correspondence and sub-
stitution, are all implicit in the operations that deal with such
situations, although they become explicit and generalized only
when operations are conducted symbolically in reference to
one another.
The failure of empiricism to account for mathematical ideas
is due to its failure to connect them with acts performed. In
accord with its sensationalistic character, traditional empiricism
sought their origin in sensory impressions, or at most in sup-
posed abstraction from properties antecedently characterizing
physical things. Experimental empiricism has none of the
difficulties of Hume and Mill in explaining the origin of
mathematical truths. It recognizes that experience, the actual
experience of men, is one of doing acts, performing operations,
cutting, marking off, dividing up, extending, piecing together,
joining, assembling and mixing, hoarding and dealing out; in
general, selecting and adjusting things as means for reaching
consequences. Only the peculiar hypnotic effect exercised by
exclusive preoccupation with knowledge could have led thinkers
to identify experience with reception of sensations, when
five minutes' observation of a child would have disclosed that
sensations count only as stimuli and registers of motor activity
expended in doing things.
All that was required for the development of mathematics
as a science and for the growth of a logic of ideas, that is,
of implications of operations with respect one to another,
was that some men should appear upon the scene who were
interested in the operations on their own account, as operations,
and not as means to specified particular uses. When symbols
were devised for operations cut off from concrete application,
as happened under the influence of the aesthetic interest of
the Greeks, the rest followed naturally. Physical means, the
straightedge, the compass and the marker remained, and so
did physical diagrams. But the latter were only "figures",
THE PLAY OF IDEAS 151
images in the Platonic sense. Intellectual force was carried by
the operations they symbolized, ruler and compass were only
means for linking up with one another a series of operations
represented by symbols. Diagrams, etc., were particular and
variable, but the operations were uniform and general in
their intellectual force: that is, in their relation to other
operations.
When once the way was opened to thinking in terms of
possible operations irrespective of actual performance, there
was no limit to development save human ingenuity. In general,
it proceeded along two lines. On the one hand, for the execution
of tasks of physical inquiry, special intellectual instrumen-
talities were needed, and this need led to the invention of new
operations and symbolic systems. The Cartesian analytics and
the calculuses of Leibniz and Newton are cases in point. Such
developments have created a definite body of subject-matter
that, historically, is as empirical as is the historic sequence of,
say, spinning-machines. Such a body of material arouses need
for examination on its own account. It is subjected to careful
inspection with reference to the relations found within its own
content. Indications of superfluous operations are eliminated ;
ambiguities are detected and analysed; massed operations are
broken up into definite constituents; gaps and unexplained
jumps are made good by insertion of connecting operations.
In short, certain canons of rigorous interrelation of operations
are developed and the old material is correspondingly revised
and extended.
Nor is the work merely one of analytic revision. The
detection, for example, of the logical looseness of the
Euclidean postulate regarding parallels suggested operations
previously unthought of, and opened up new fields those of
the hyper-geometries. Moreover, the possibility of combining
various existing branches of geometry as special cases of more
comprehensive operations (illustrated by the same instance)
led to creation of mathematics of a higher order of generality.
152 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
I am not interested in tracing the history of mathematics.
What is wanted is to indicate that once the idea of possible
operations, indicated by symbols and performed only by means
of symbols, is discovered, the road is opened to operations of
ever increasing definiteness and comprehensiveness. Any group
of symbolic operations suggests further operations that may
be performed. Technical symbols are framed with precisely
this end in view. They have three traits that distinguish them
from casual terms and ideas. They are selected with a view to
designating unambiguously one mode of interaction and one
only. They are linked up with symbols of other operations
forming a system such that transition is possible with the
utmost economy of energy from one to another. And the
aim is that these transitions may occur as far as possible in
any direction, i. " Water" for example suggests an indefinite
number of acts; seeing, tasting, drinking, washing, without
specification of one in preference to another. It also marks
off water from other colourless liquids only in a vague way.
2. At the same time, it is restricted; it does not connect the
liquid with solid and gaseous forms, and still less does it
indicate operations which link the production of water to
other things into which its constituents, oxygen and hydrogen,
enter. It is isolated instead of being a transitive concept.
3. The chemical conception, symbolized by H 2 O, not only
meets these two requirements which "water" fails to meet,
but oxygen and hydrogen are in turn connected with the whole
system of chemical elements and specified combinations among
them in a systematic way. Starting from the elements and the
relation defined in H 2 O one can, so to speak, travel through
all the whole scope and range of complex and varied pheno-
mena. Thus the scientific conception carries thought and
action away from qualities which are finalities as they are
found in direct perception and use, to the mode of pro-
duction of these qualities, and it performs this task in a way
which links this mode of generation to a multitude of other
THE PLAY OF IDEAS 153
"efficient" causal conditions in the most economical and effec-
tive manner.
Mathematical conceptions, by means of symbols of operations
that are irrespective of actual performance, carry abstraction
much further; one has only to contrast "2" as attached
physically to H, to "2" as pure number. The latter designates
an operative relation applicable to anything whatsoever, though
not actually applied to any specified object. And, of course,
it stands in defined relations to all other numbers, and by a
system of correspondences with continuous quantities as well.
That numbers disregard all qualitative distinctions is a familiar
fact. This disregard is the consequence of construction of
symbols dealing with possible operations in abstraction from
the actuality of performance. If time and knowledge permitted,
it could be shown that the difficulties and paradoxes which
have been found to attend the logic of number disappear when
instead of their being treated as either essences or as properties
of things in existence, they are viewed as designations of
potential operations. Mathematical space is not a kind of space
distinct from so-called physical and empirical space, but is
a name given to operations ideally or formally possible with
respect to things having spacious qualities: it is not a mode of
Being, but a way of thinking things so that connections among
them are liberated from fixity in experience and implication
from one to another is made possible.
The distinction between physical and mathematical con-
ception may be brought out by noting an ambiguity in the
term "possible" operations. Its primary meaning is actually,
existentially, possible. Any idea as such designates an operation
that may be performed, not something in actual existence. The
idea of the sweetness of, say, sugar, is an indication of the
consequences of a possible operation of tasting as distinct
from a directly experienced quality. Mathematical ideas are
designations of possible operations in another and secondary
sense, previously expressed in speaking of the possibility of
154 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
symbolic operations with respect to one another. This sense
of possibility is compossibility of operations, not possibility
of performance with respect to existence. Its test is non-
incompatibility. The statement of this test as consistency
hardly carries the full meaning. For consistency is readily
interpreted to signify the conformity of one meaning with
others already had, and is in so far restrictive. "Non-incom-
patibility" indicates that all developments are welcome as
long as they do not conflict with one another, or as long as
restatement of an operation prevents actual conflict. It is a
canon of liberation rather than of restriction. It may be com-
pared with natural selection, which is a principle of elimination
but not one controlling positive development.
Mathematics and formal logic thus mark highly specialized
branches of intellectual industry, whose working principles
are very similar to those of works of fine art. The trait that
strikingly characterizes them is combination of freedom with
rigour freedom with respect to development of new operations
and ideas; rigour with respect to formal compossibilities. The
combination of these qualities, characteristic also of works of
great art, gives the subject great fascination for some minds.
But the belief that these qualifications remove mathematical
objects from all connection with existence expresses a religious
mood rather than a scientific discovery. 1
The significant difference is that of two types of possibility
of operation, material and symbolic. This distinction when
frozen into the dogma of two orders of Being, existence and
essence, gives rise to the notion that there are two types of
1 "The long-continued and infrequently interrupted study of abso-
lutely invariant existences exercises a powerful hypnotic influence on
the mind. . . . The world which it separates from the rest of experience
and makes into the whole of being is a world of unchanging and
apparently eternal order, the only Absolute cold intellect need not
reject. A conviction thus establishes itself which finally affects the
whole of waking thought : that in this experience one has at last dis-
covered the eternal and ultimate truth." Barry, op. cit., pp. 182-183.
THE PLAY OF IDEAS 155
logic and two criteria of truth, the formal and the material,
of which the formal is higher and more fundamental. In truth,
the formal development is a specialized offshoot of material
thinking. It is derived ultimately from acts performed, and
constitutes an extension of such acts, made possible by symbols,
on the basis of congruity with one another. Consequently
formal logic represents an analysis of exclusively symbolic
operations ; it is, in a pregnant and not external sense, symbolic
logic. This interpretation of mathematical and (formal)
logical ideas is not a disparagement of them except from
a mystical point of view. Symbols, as has already been noted,
afford the only way of escape from submergence in existence.
The liberation afforded by the free symbolism of mathematics
is often a means of ulterior return to existential operations
that have a scope and penetrating power not otherwise
attainable. The history of science is full of illustrations of
cases in which mathematical ideas for which no physical
application was known suggested in time new existential
relations.
The theory which has been advanced of the nature of
essences (universals, invariants) may be tested by comparing
the conditions which symbolic operations fulfil with the attri-
butes traditionally imputed to the former. These attributes
are ideality, universality, immutability, formality, and the
subsistence of relations of implication that make deduction
possible. There is a one to one correspondence between these
characters and those of objects of thought which are defined
in terms of operations that are compossible with respect to
one another.
The correspondence will be approached by pointing out
the traits of a machine which marks its structure in view of
the function it fulfils. It is obvious that this structure can be
understood not by sense but only by thought of the relations
which the parts of the machine sustain to one another, in con-
nection with the work the machine as a whole performs (the
i 5 6 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
consequences it effects). Sensibly, one is merely overwhelmed
in the presence of a machine by noises and forms. Clarity and
order of perceived objects are introduced when forms are
judged in relation to operations, and these in turn in relation to
work done. Movements may be seen in isolation, and products,
goods turned out, may be perceived in isolation. The machine
is known only when these are thought in connection with one
another. In this thought, motions and parts are judged as
means] they are referred intellectually to something else; to
think of anything as means is to apprehend an object in
relation. Correlatively, the physical effect is judged as con-
sequence something related. The relation of means-consequence
may thus justifiably be termed ideal in the sense of ideational.
Operations as such, that is, as connective interactions, are
uniform. Physically and sensibly, a machine changes through
friction, exposure to weather, etc., while products vary in
quality. Processes are local and temporal, particular. But the
relation of means and consequence which defines an operation
remains one and the same in spite of these variations. It is a
universal. A machine turns out a succession of steel spheres,
like ball-bearings. These closely resemble one another, because
they are products of like process. But there is no absolute
exactitude among them. Each process is individual and not
exactly identical with others. But the function for which the
machine is designed does not alter with these changes; an
operation, being a relation, is not a process. An operation
determines any number of processes and products all differing
from one another; but being a telephone or a cutting tool is
a self-identical universal, irrespective of the multiplicity of
special objects which manifest the function.
The relation is thus invariant. It is eternal, not in the sense
of enduring throughout all time, or being everlasting like an
Aristotelean species or a Newtonian substance, but in the sense
that an operation as a relation which is grasped in thought is
independent of the instances in which it is overtly exemplified,
THE PLAY OF IDEAS 157
although its meaning is found only in the possibility of these
actualizations.
The relation, between things as means and things as con-
sequences, which defines a machine is ideal in another sense.
It is the standard by which the value of existential processes
is estimated. The deterioration or improvement in use of a
concrete machine and the worth of an invention are judged
by reference to efficiency in accomplishment of a function. The
more adequately the functional relation can be apprehended
in the abstract, the better can the engineer detect defects in
an existent machine and project improvements in it. Thus the
thought of it operates as a model ; it has an archetypal character
with respect to particular machines.
Thought of an object as an ideal therefore determines a
characteristic internal structure or form. This formal structure
is only approximated by existing things. One may conceive
of a steam-engine which has a one hundred per cent, efficiency,
although no such ideal is even remotely approached in actuality.
Or, one may like Helmholtz conceive an ideal optical apparatus
in which the defects of the existing human eye are not found.
The ideal relationship of means to ends exists as a formal
possibility determined by the nature of the case even though
it be not thought of, much less realized in fact. It subsists
as a possibility, and as a possibility it is in its formal structure
necessary. That is to say, the conditions which have to be
met and fulfilled in the idea of a machine having an efficiency
of one hundred per cent, are set by the necessities of the case;
they do not alter with defects in our apprehension of them.
Hence essences may be regarded as having Being independent
of and logically prior to our thought of them. There is, how-
ever, in this fact nothing of the mystery or transcendental
character which is often associated with it. It signifies that
if one is to attain a specified result one must conform to
the conditions which are means of securing this result; if
one is to get the result with the maximum of efficiency,
IS 8 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
there are conditions having a necessary relationship to that
intent.
This necessity of a structure marked by formal relationships
which fulfil the conditions of serving as means for an end,
accounts for the relations of implication which make deduction
possible. One goes into a factory and finds that the operation
of reaching an end, say, making in quantity shoes of a uniform
standard, is subdivided into a number of processes, each of
which is adapted to the one which precedes, and, until the
final one, to that which follows. One does not make a miracle
or mystery of the fact that while each machine and each pro-
cess is physically separate, nevertheless all are adapted to one
another. For he knows that they have been designed, through
a "rationalization" of the undertaking, to effect this end.
The act of knowing is also highly complex. Experience
shows that it also may be best effected by analysis into a
number of distinct processes, which bear a serial relation to
one another. Terms and propositions which symbolize the
possible operations that are to control these processes are
designed so that they will lead one to another with the maximum
of definiteness, flexibility and fertility. In other words, they
are constructed with reference to the function of implication.
Deduction or dialectic is the operation of developing these
implications, which may be novel and unexpected just as a
tool often gives unexpected results when working under new
conditions. One is entitled to marvel at the constructive power
with which symbols have been devised having far-reaching
and fruitful implications. But the wonder is misdirected when
it is made the ground for hypostatizing the objects of thought
into a realm of transcendent Being.
This phase of the discussion is not complete till it has been
explicitly noted that all general conceptions (ideas, theories,
thought) are hypothetical. Ability to frame hypotheses is the
means by which man is liberated from submergence in the
existences that surround him and that play upon him physically
THE PLAY OF IDEAS 159
and sensibly. It is the positive phase of abstraction. But
hypotheses are conditional; they have to be tested by the
consequences of the operations they define and direct. The
discovery of the value of hypothetical ideas when employed
to suggest and direct concrete processes, and the vast extension
of this operation in the modern history of science, mark a
great emancipation and correspondent increase of intellectual
control. But their final value is not determined by their internal
elaboration and consistency, but by the consequences they
effect in existence as that is perceptibly experienced. Scientific
conceptions are not a revelation of prior and independent
reality. They are a system of hypotheses, worked out under
conditions of definite test, by means of which our intellectual
and practical traffic with nature is rendered freer, more secure
and more significant.
Our discussion has been one-sided in that it has dealt with the
matter of conceptions mainly in reference to the " rationalistic"
tradition of interpretation. The reasons for this emphasis are
too patent to need exposition. But before leaving the topic,
it should be noted that traditional empiricism has also misread
the significance of conceptions or general ideas. It has steadily
opposed the doctrine of their a priori character; it has con-
nected them with experience of the actual world. But even more
obviously than the rationalism it has opposed, empiricism has
connected the origin, content and measure of validity of general
ideas with antecedent existence. According to it, concepts are
formed by comparing particular objects, already perceived,
with one another, and then eliminating the elements in which
they disagree and retaining that which they have in common.
Concepts are thus simply memoranda of identical features
in objects already perceived ; they are conveniences, bunching
together a variety of things scattered about in concrete
experience. But they have to be proved by agreement with
the material of particular antecedent experiences; their value
and function is essentially retrospective. Such ideas are dead,
160 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
incapable of performing a regulative office in new situations.
They are "empirical" in the sense in which the term is opposed
to scientific that is, they are mere summaries of results
obtained under more or less accidental circumstances.
Our next chapter will be devoted to explicit consideration
of the historic philosophies of empiricism and rationalism
about the nature of knowledge. Before passing to this theme,
we conclude with a summary statement of the more important
results reached in the present phase of discussion. First, the
active and productive character of ideas, of thought, is manifest.
The motivating desire of idealistic systems of philosophy is
justified. But the constructive office of thought is empirical
that is, experimental. "Thought" is not a property of some-
thing termed intellect or reason apart from nature. It is a
mode of directed overt action. Ideas are anticipatory plans
and designs which take effect in concrete reconstructions of
antecedent conditions of existence. They are not innate
properties of mind corresponding to ultimate prior traits of
Being, nor are they a priori categories imposed on sense in
a wholesale, once-for-all way, prior to experience so as to
make it possible. The active power of ideas is a reality, but
ideas and idealisms have an operative force in concrete
experienced situations; their worth has to be tested by the
specified consequences of their operation. Idealism is some-
thing experimental not abstractly rational; it is related to
experienced needs and concerned with projection of operations
which remake the actual content of experienced objects.
Secondly, ideas and idealisms are in themselves hypotheses
not finalities. Being connected with operations to be performed,
they are tested by the consequences of these operations, not
by what exists prior to them. Prior experience supplies the
conditions which evoke ideas and of which thought has to
take account, with which it must reckon. It furnishes both
obstacles to attainment of what is desired and the resources
that must be used to attain it. Conception and systems of
THE PLAY OF IDEAS 161
conceptions, ends in view and plans, are constantly making and
remaking as fast as those already in use reveal their weak-
nesses, defects and positive values. There is no predestined
course they must follow. Human experience consciously guided
by ideas evolves its own standards and measures and each new
experience constructed by their means is an opportunity for
new ideas and ideals.
In the third place, action is at the heart of ideas. The
experimental practice of knowing, when taken to supply the
pattern of philosophic doctrine of mind and its organs,
eliminates the age-old separation of theory and practice. It
discloses that knowing is itself a kind of action, the only one
which progressively and securely clothes natural existence with
realized meanings. For the outcome of experienced objects
which are begot by operations which define thinking, take into
themselves, as part of their own funded and incorporated
meaning, the relation to other things disclosed by thinking.
There are no sensory or perceived objects fixed in themselves.
In the course of experience, as far as that is an outcome
influenced by thinking, objects perceived, used and enjoyed
take up into their own meaning the results of thought; they
become ever richer and fuller of meanings. This issue con-
stitutes the last significance of the philosophy of experimental
idealism. Ideas direct operations; the operations have a result
in which ideas are no longer abstract, mere ideas, but where
they qualify sensible objects. The road from a perceptible
experience which is blind, obscure, fragmentary, meagre in
meaning, to objects of sense which are also objects which
satisfy, reward and feed intelligence is through ideas that are
experimental and operative.
Our conclusion depends upon an analysis of what takes
place in the experimental inquiry of natural science. It goes
without saying that the wider scope of human experience,
that which is concerned with distinctively human conditions
and ends, does not comport, as it currently exists, with the
L
162 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
result that the examination of natural science yields. The
genuinely philosophic force, as distinct from a technical one,
of the conclusion reached lies in precisely this incongruity.
The fact that the most exacting type of experience has attained
a marvellous treasury of working ideas that are used in control
of objects is an indication of possibilities as yet unattained in
less restricted forms of experience. Negatively, the result
indicates the need of thoroughgoing revision of ideas of mind
and thought and their connection with natural things that were
formed before the rise of experimental inquiry; such is the
critical task imposed on contemporary thought. Positively, the
result achieved in science is a challenge to philosophy to
consider the possibility of the extension of the method of
operative intelligence to direction of life in other fields.
CHAPTER VII
THE SEAT OF INTELLECTUAL AUTHORITY
THE DISPUTE AS TO whether reason and conception or percep-
tion and sense are the source and test of ultimate knowledge
is one of the most enduring in the history of thought. It has
affected philosophy from the side of both the nature of the
object of knowledge and the mental faculty operating to obtain
it. From the side of the object those who put forward the claims
of reason have placed the universal higher than the individual ;
those who have held to perception have reversed the order.
From the side of mind, one school has emphasized the synthetic
action of conceptions. The other school has dwelt upon the
fact that in sensation the mind does not interfere with the
action of objects in writing their own report. The opposition has
extended to problems of conduct and society. On the one hand,
there is emphasis upon the necessity of control by rational
standards; on the other hand, the dynamic quality of wants
has been insisted upon together with the intimately personal
character of their satisfaction as against the pale remoteness of
pure thought. On the political side, there is a like division
between the adherents of order and organization, those who
feel that reason alone gives security, and those interested in
freedom, innovation and progress, those who have used the
claims of the individual and his desires as a philosophical
basis.
The controversy is acute and long-standing. In consequence
of it, philosophers have expended energy in controversy with
one another, and the guidance they have given to practical
affairs has been largely by way of support to partisans of
contending forces. The situation raises a further point in our
inquiry: What is the bearing of the experimental theory of
knowing upon the rival contentions? The first point which
presents itself is that the object of knowledge is eventual;
i6 4 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
that is, it is an outcome of directed experimental operations,
instead of something in sufficient existence before the act of
knowing. The further point to be presented is that, along with
this change, sensible and rational factors cease to be com-
petitors for primary rank. They are allies, co-operating to make
knowledge possible. Isolation from each other is an expression
of the isolation of each from organic connection with action.
When theory is placed in opposition to practice, there is ground
for dispute as to whether primacy in theory shall go to sense
or intellect. Directed activity demands ideas which go beyond
the results of past perceptions, for it goes out to meet future
and as yet unexperienced situations. But it deals, both in origin
and outcome, with things which can be had only directly,
through immediate perception and enjoyment.
The three chief contending doctrines in this field are
sensational empiricism, rationalism and Kantianism, with its
compromise of the factors isolated in the two other schools.
The doctrine of Kant has a superficial resemblance to the one
just stated ; it insists upon the necessity of both perception and
ideas if there is to be knowledge. It is convenient, accordingly,
to begin discussion with it. The element of similarity is
suggested by Kant's well-known saying that perception without
conception is blind, conception without perception empty.
His doctrine none the less is fundamentally different from that
which results from an analysis of experimental knowing. The
fundamental difference lies in the fact that, according to the
latter, the distinction of sense and thought occurs within the
process of reflective inquiry, and the two are connected together
by means of operations overtly performed. In the Kantian
scheme, the two originally exist in independence of each other,
and their connection is established by operations that are
covert and are performed in the hidden recesses of mind, once
for all. As to their original difference, sense-material is impressed
from without, while connective conceptions are supplied from
within the understanding. As to connection, synthesis takes
THE SEAT OF INTELLECTUAL AUTHORITY 165
place not intentionally and by means of the controlled art of
investigation, but automatically and all at once.
From the experimental point of view, the art of knowing
demands skill in selecting appropriate sense-data on one side
and connecting principles, or conceptual theories, on the other.
It requires a developed and constantly progressive technique
to settle upon both the observational data and the idea that
assist inquiry in reaching a conclusion in any particular case.
But in Kant's view, the distinction and the connection between
the two, while necessary to anything which may be termed
cognition, have nothing to do with the validity of any par-
ticular enterprise of knowing. Illusion and error exemplify the
synthesis of sense and understanding quite as much as does the
soundest instance of scientific discovery. In one case, the heart
of the whole matter is the exercise of a differential control
which makes the difference between good and bad knowing.
In Kant's scheme the blessings of the categories descend upon
the material of sense without reference to making a distinction
between the true and the false.
We summarize the differences as follows, i. In experimental
knowing, the antecedent is always the subject-matter of some
experience which has its origin in natural causes, but which,
not having been controlled in its occurrence, is uncertain and
problematic. Original objects of experience are produced by
the natural interactions of organism and environment, and in
themselves are neither sensible, conceptual nor a mixture of
the two. They are precisely the qualitative material of all our
ordinary untested experiences. 2. The distinction between
sense-data and interpretative ideas is deliberately instituted by
the process of inquiry, for sake of carrying it forward to an
adequately tested conclusion, one with a title to acceptance.
3. Hence each term of the distinction is not absolute and fixed,
but is contingent and tentative. Each is subject to revision as
we find observational data which supply better evidence, and
as the growth of science provides better directive hypotheses
1 66 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
to draw upon. 4. Hence the materials selected to serve as data
and as regulative principles constantly check one another; any
advance in one brings about a corresponding improvement in
the other. The two are constantly working together to effect
a rearrangement of the original experienced material in the
construction of a new object having the properties that make
it understood or known.
These statements are formal, but their meaning is not
recondite. Any scientific investigation illustrates their sig-
nificance. The astronomer, chemist, botanist, start from the
material of gross unanalysed experience, that of the "common-
sense" world in which we live, suffer, act and enjoy; from
familiar stars, suns, moons, from acids, salts and metals, trees,
mosses and growing plants. Then the process of investigation
divides into two kinds of operations. One is that of careful
and analytic observation to determine exactly what there is
which is indubitably seen, touched and heard. An operation
takes place to discover what the sure data of the problem are,
the evidence which theoretical explanation must reckon with.
The other operation consists in searching through previous
knowledge to obtain ideas which may be used to interpret this
observed material and to suggest the initiation of new experi-
ments. By these latter, more data are had, and the additional
evidence they supply suggests new ideas and more experiments
until the problem is resolved. The investigator never makes
the division between perceptual and conceptual material at
large or wholesale. He is careful at each stage of inquiry to
discriminate between what he has observed and what is a
matter of theory and ideas, using the latter as means of directing
further observations, the results of which test the application
of the ideas and theories employed. Finally, the original
material is reorganized into a coherent and settled form capable
of entering integrally into the general system of science.
A physician, for example, is called by a patient. His original
THE SEAT OF INTELLECTUAL AUTHORITY 167
of useless imagination to fancy that the ill man is a mass of
sense data organized by categories. This experienced object
sets the problem of inquiry. Certain clinical operations are
performed, sounding, tapping, getting registrations of pulse,
temperature, respiration, etc. These constitute the symptoms;
they supply the evidence to be interpreted. The philosopher
or logician, looking on, sees they are that part of the original
object which is capable of being presented in observation
as that is sensibly present. The results are not all that is or
can be observed, but are those phases and portions of the
experienced whole that are judged to be relevant to making an
inference as to the nature of the ailment. The observations
mean something not in and of themselves, but are given
meaning in the light of the systematized knowledge of medicine
as far as that is at the command of the practitioner. He calls
upon his store of knowledge to suggest ideas that may aid
him in reaching a judgment as to the nature of the trouble
and its proper treatment. The analytic philosopher, looking on,
notes that the interpreting material, by means of which the
scattered data of sense are bound together into a coherent
whole, is not itself directly sensibly present. So he calls it
ideational or conceptual.
Sense-data are signs which direct this selection of ideas;
the ideas when suggested arouse new observations; the two
together determine his final judgment or diagnosis and his
procedure. Something is then added to the store of the clinical
material of medical art so that subsequent observations of
symptoms are refined and extended, and the store of material
from which to draw ideas is further enlarged. To this process
of co-operation of observation and conceptual or general ideas
there is no limit. In no case are the data the whole of the
original object; they are material selected for the purpose
of serving as evidence and signs. In no case do general ideas,
principles, laws, conceptions, determine the conclusion
although just as some men collect fragmentary observations
1 68 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
without trying to find out what they mean, so in other cases
an unskilled worker permits some preconceived idea to control
his decision instead of using it as a hypothesis.
The case seems simple enough, so simple indeed that it
may be supposed that we have overlooked the conditions which
have created perplexity and controversy. But the source of
these complications is that theories about the mind, about sen-
sation and perception, about reason, the intellect, conception
and perception, were framed and established in philosophy
before the rise of experimental knowing. It is difficult to break
loose from habits thus engendered so as to turn attention in
a whole-hearted way to actual inquiry. While it may seem
presumptuous to set up the case of the physician or some
other concrete inquirer over against the elaborate machinery
of the Critique of Pure Reason and the countless tomes of
commentary it has called forth, our picture has behind it the
whole weight of the experimental practices by which science
has been actually advanced.
More specifically, it may be asserted that the Kantian theory
went wrong because it took distinctions that are genuine and
indispensable out of their setting and function in actual inquiry.
It generalized them into fixed and wholesale distinctions, losing
sight of their special roles in attainment of those tested beliefs
which give security. Consequently artificial complications were
engendered and insoluble puzzles created.
Take for example the fragmentary and isolated character of
sense-data. Taken in isolation from a context in a particular
inquiry they undoubtedly have this character. Hence when
they are generalized into a character at large, the result is
the doctrine of the disconnected "atomicity" of sense-data.
This doctrine is common to sensationalism and to some forms
of the new realism, along with Kantianism. As a matter of
fact, smells, tastes, sounds, pressures, colours, etc., are not
isolated ; they are bound together by all kinds of interactions or
connections, among which are included the habitual responses
THE SEAT OF INTELLECTUAL AUTHORITY 169
of the one having the experience. Some connections are organic,
flowing from the constitution of the subject. Others have
become engrained in habit because of education and the
customary state of culture. But these habitual connections
are obstacles rather than aids. Some of them are irrelevant and
misleading. In any case, they fail to provide the clues, the
evidence which is wanted in the particular inquiry in hand.
Consequently, sense qualities are artificially isolated from their
ordinary connections so that the inquirer is free to see them
in a new light or as constituents of a new object.
Since the very need for inquiry shows that there is a problem
set by the existing situation, there can be no understanding
of it achieved until there are new connections established. The
fragmentary and isolated character of sense-data does not
therefore describe anything belonging to them intrinsically,
but marks a transitory, although necessary, stage in the progress
of inquiry. The isolation of sense-data from their status and
office in furthering the objective of knowing is responsible for
treating them as a kind of isolated atomic existence. If we
keep an eye on the actual enterprise of knowing, it is clear
that only sense-data can supply evidential subject-matter ; ideas
of what is not presented in sense interpret evidence, but they
cannot constitute it. The whole history of science shows,
however, that material directly and originally observed does
not furnish good evidential material; as we saw, it was the
essential mistake of ancient science to suppose that we can
base inference upon observed objects without an artificial
prior analytic resolution. Hence there is need of a distinctive
type of experimental operations which detach some qualities
of the object ; these form sense-data in the technical meaning
of the word.
Traditional empiricism was accordingly right in insisting
that no amount of conceptions, of thought material, could by
itself deliver any knowledge of existence, no matter how
elaborate be the conceptual system and how internally coherent.
170 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
We cannot derive existence from thoughtpace idealism.
Observed material is necessary to suggest ideas and it is equally
necessary to test them. The senses are, existentially speaking,
the organs by which we obtain the material of observation.
But, as we have previously noted, this material is significant
and effective for purposes of knowing only as it is connected
with operations of which it is the product. Merely physical
interactions, whether of external things or of the organism,
yield observations that form the material of inquiry; a prob-
lematic material. Only operations intentionally performed and
attentively noted in connection with their products give observed
material a positive intellectual value, and this condition is
satisfied only by thought: ideas are the perception of this
connection. Even non-scientific experience, as far as it has
meaning, is neither mere doing nor mere undergoing, but is
an acknowledgment of the connection between something done
and something undergone in consequence of the doing.
In its later history, empiricism tended to identify sensory
consequences with " mental' ' or psychical states and processes;
this identification was the logical conclusion of taking the
object of science, in which these qualities are not found, as
the real object. But the insistence, as by contemporary realists,
that sense-data are external and not mental does not remedy
the logical error. It repeats the isolation of sense-data from
the intentional operations by which they are supplied and
from the purpose and function of these operations. Hence it
makes it necessary to call in the supplement of logical objects,
now termed essences. What is even more important, no light
is thrown upon the control of the course of actual inquiry.
For there is still failure to see that the distinction between
sense-data and objects of rational apprehension is one which
occurs within reflective investigation, for the sake of regulating
its procedure.
The history of the theory of knowledge or epistemology
would have been verv different if instead of the word "data"
THE SEAT OF INTELLECTUAL AUTHORITY 171
or "givens", it had happened to start with calling the qualities
in question "takens". Not that the data are not existential and
qualities of the ultimately "given" that is, the total subject-
matter which is had in non-cognitive experiences. But as data
they are selected from this total original subject-matter which
gives the impetus to knowing; they are discriminated for a
purpose: that, namely, of affording signs or evidence to
define and locate a problem, and thus give a clue to its
resolution.
If we recur to the instance of the patient and the inquiries
of the physician, it is evident that the presence of a man who
is ill is the "given", and that this given is complex, marked
by all kinds of diverse qualities. Only the assumption such
is made by Kant and is common to the traditional theories
that all experience is inherently cognitive leads to the doctrine
that perception of the patient is a case of knowledge. In reality
the original perception furnishes the problem for knowing; it
is something to be known, not an object of knowing. And in
knowing, the first thing to be done is to select from the mass
of presented qualities those which, in distinction from other
qualities, throw light upon the nature of the trouble. As they
are deliberately selected, being discriminated by special tech-
nical operations, they become data; these are called sensible
simply because of the role of sense organs in their generation.
They may then be formulated as the subject-matter of primitive
existential propositions. But even so, there is no class of such
propositions in general. Each inquiry yields its own primitive
existential propositions, even though they all agree in having
for their objects qualities which investigation reveals to be
connected with the use of organs of sense. Moreover, these
primitive propositions are such only in a logical sense as
distinct from being empirically primitive, and they are only
hypothetical or conditional. This statement does not imply
that their existence is hypothetical; perception, as far as it is
properly conducted, warrants their existence. But their status
172 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
in inquiry is tentative. Many, perhaps most, errors in physical
inference arise from taking as data things that are not data
from the problem in hand ; they undoubtedly exist, but they are
not the evidence that is demanded. In some respects, the more
undoubted the existence of sensory qualities, the less certain is
their meaning for inference; the very fact that a quality is
glaringly obvious in perception exercises an undue influence,
leading thought to take its evident presence as an equivalent of
evidential value. The reader of detective stories is aware that
it is a common device to have the inquirer misled by the too
patent character of given "clues"; genuine clues are usually
obscure and have to be searched out. The conditional character
of sense-data in inferential inquiry means, then, that they have
to be tested by their consequences. They are good clues or
evidence when they instigate operations whose effect is to solve
the problem in hand.
It is hardly necessary to repeat the criticisms of the rational-
istic doctrine of conceptions that have been brought out in
previous chapters. The doctrine stood for a positive truth:
the necessity of relations, of connectivity in existence and
knowledge, and it noted the fact of the connection of relations
with thought. For while some connections are always found
in the material of experienced things, the fact that as experienced
these things are problematic and not definitely known, means
that important relations are not presented in them as they
stand. These relations have to be projected in anticipation
if the reactions of the inquiries are not blind fumblings if
they are genuinely experimental. Such relations must be
thought ; they are present conceptually, not sensibly. They
represent possible consequences of operations, and the possible
and the conceivable are one. Just as sensationalism ignores the
functional role and hypothetical status of sensible qualities
in an inquiry, so rationalism makes a fixed and independent
matter out of the utility of conceptions in directing inquiry
to solve particular problems.
THE SEAT OF INTELLECTUAL AUTHORITY 173
The object of this criticism of historical theories of know-
ledge is not just to cast discredit upon them. It is to direct
attention to the source of their errors. As soon as and when-
ever it is assumed that the office of knowledge is to lay hold
of existence which is prior to and apart from the operations
of inquiry and their consequences, one or other of these errors
or some combination of both of them is inevitable. Either
logical characters belonging to the operations of effective
inquiry are read into antecedent existence; or the world as
known is reduced to a pulverized multiplicity of atomically
isolated elements, a Kantian "manifold"; or some machinery
Is devised, whether of an "idealistic" or a "realistic" sort, to
bring the two together.
When, on the other hand, it is seen that the object of
knowledge is prospective and eventual, being the result of
inferential or reflective operations which redispose what was
antecedently existent, the subject-matters called respectively
sensible and conceptual are seen to be complementary in
effective direction of inquiry to an intelligible conclusion.
There is another way of discussing the fundamental issue
which does not involve so much going over topics worn thread-
bare by previous discussion. In effect, traditional theories treat
all reflective or inferential knowledge as cases of "explanation",
and by explanation is meant making some seemingly new
object or problem plain and clear by identifying its elements
with something previously known, ultimately something said
to be known immediately and intuitively, or without inference.
In traditional theory, "discursive" knowledge, that involving
reflection, must always be referred for its validation back to
what is immediately known. It cannot bring its credentials
with it and test its results in the very process of reaching them.
There is postulated identity implicit or explicit of the results
of inference with things known without inference. Making the
identity explicit constitutes proof.
There are many different and opposed theories regarding
174 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
the way in which this identification takes place. There is a
doctrine that the operation is one of subsumption of given
particulars under given universals; that it is classificatory
definition ; that it is a kind of Platonic reminiscence in which
perceptual material is cognized by being identified with a priori
forms; that it is a case of schematization a la Kant; that it
is an assimilation of present sensations to images that revive
previous sensations. These theories differ widely among them-
selves; they are irreconcilable with one another. But they all
have one premise in common. They all assume that the
conclusions of reflective inference must be capable of reduction
to things already known if they are to be proved. The quarrel
between them is strictly domestic, all in the family. The
differences between them concern the character of the original
immediately known objects with which the conclusions of
reflection must be identified in order to be really known. They
all involve the supposed necessity that whatever is a product
of inference must, in order to be valid knowledge, be reducible
to something already known immediately. Thus they all take
the element of knowledge found in inferential conclusions to
be simply a matter of restatement. 1
The especial significance of the experimental procedure
is that it scraps once for all the notion that the results of
inference must be validated by operations of identification of
whatever sort. When we compare the premise which underlies
all the different theories that assume a primitive mode of
1 The logic of Stuart Mill is the classic logic of sensational empiri-
cism. Yet he demanded "canons'* of proof for induction as rigorous as
those of Aristotle were for syllogistic reasoning. The essence of these
canons is that proof consists in identification of the results of inference
with particulars given in sense, just as with Aristotle demonstration
consisted in subsuming them under independently given universals.
That the latter was influenced by Euclidean geometry with its assump-
tion of axioms as self-evident truths we have already noticed. Mathe-
maticians now recognize that indemonstrables and indefinables are
starting-points of operations and that in themselves they have neither
meaning nor " truth".
THE SEAT OF INTELLECTUAL AUTHORITY 175
direct knowledge (knowledge which does not include reflection)
with the practice of experimental science, according to which
only the conclusion of reflective inquiry is known, we find three
marked points of contrast. The first difference is that the
traditional theories make all reflective knowledge to be a case
of recognition going back to an earlier more certain form of
knowledge. The second is that they have no place for genuine
discovery or creative novelty. The third point concerns the
dogmatic character of the assumption regarding what is said
to be immediately known, in contrast with the experimentally
tested character of the object known in consequence of
reflection.
We begin with the last point. When it is stated that the
conclusions of knowledge involving inference must be sub-
ordinated to knowledge which is had directly and immediately,
and must be carried to the latter for proof and verification, we
are at once struck by the multitude of theories regarding what
is immediately and infallibly known. The diversity and con-
tradictions give ground for a suspicion that in no case is the
"knowledge" in question as self-evident as it is asserted to be.
And there is good theoretical ground for the suspicion. Suppose
a man "explains" the eclipse of the moon by saying it is due
to the attempt of a dragon to devour it. To him the devouring
dragon is a more evident fact than is the darkening of the
moon. To us the existence of an animal capable of such a feat
is the doubtful matter. It will be objected that it is unfair to
take such an absurd case as an instance: dragons are not the
sort of thing which any philosopher has asserted to be the
object of direct and certain non-inferential knowledge. But
the illustration still serves a purpose.
The thing to be known is "explained" by identification
with something else. What guarantees this something else?
If it too has to be guaranteed by identification with something
else, there is an infinite regress. To avoid this regress we stop
short and assert that this or that object or truth is directly
i 7 6 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
known, by sense intuition, by rational intuition, as a direct
deliverance of consciousness, or in some other way. But what
is such a procedure except the essence of what Bentham called
ipse dixitism ? What is it but arbitrary dogmatism ? Who guards
the guardians ? The theory which places knowledge in rounded
out conclusions is in no such dilemma. It admits the hypothetical
status of all data and premises and appeals for justification to
operations capable, when they are repeated, of yielding like
results. The antecedents do not have to be substantiated by
being carried back to earlier antecedents and so on; they are
good and sound if they do what is wanted of them: if they
lead to an observable result which satisfies the conditions set
by the nature of the problem in hand.
The significance of this point comes out more clearly in
dealing with the genuineness of discovery or new knowledge.
By terms of the traditional theories, this is impossible in the
case of inference and reflective inquiry. We know, according to
them, only when we have assimilated the seemingly new to
something previously known immediately. In consequence,
all distinctive individual, or non-repeated, traits of things are
incapable of being known. What cannot be treated as a case
of something else stays outside knowledge. Individualized
characteristics are unknowable surds.
According to this doctrine, reflective inquiry may hit upon
new instances of laws, new specimens of old truths, new
members of old classes, but not upon intrinsically new objects
of knowledge. As far as empiricism is concerned the case of
Locke is Instructive. His Essay on Human Understanding is
one continued effort to test all reflective beliefs and ideas what-
ever by reduction to original * Simple ideas " that are infallibly
known in isolation from any inferential undertaking a point
in which many of the new realisms are still Lockeian.
If we look at the course of science, we find a very different
story told. Important conclusions of science are those which
distinctly refuse to be identified with anything previously
THE SEAT OF INTELLECTUAL AUTHORITY 177
known. Instead of having to be proved by being assimilated to
the latter, they rather occasion revision of what men thought
.they previously knew. The recent crisis in physical science is
a case in point. The experimental discovery that the velocity of
light remains the same when measured either with or against
the direction of the earth's movement was totally unaccount-
able on the basis of previous knowing. But scientific men
accepted the consequences of their experimental operations
as constituting the known object, rather than feeling under
obligation to "prove" them by identification with what was
said to be antecedently known. Inferential inquiry in scientific
procedure is an adventure in which conclusions confound
expectation and upset what has been accepted as facts. It takes
time for these new facts to be assimilated : to become familiar.
Assimilation of the new to the familiar is doubtless a pre-
condition for our finding ourselves at home in the new and
being able to handle it freely. But the older theories virtually
mad$ this personal and psychological phase of assimilation of
new and old into a test of knowledge itself.
The third point, that cognition is recognition, only presents
the same difficulty in another way. It presents it in a light
which brings out a distinctive point. The theory that knowledge
due to reflection consists in identifying something with what
is already known or possessed confuses the psychological trait
of familiarity, the quality of finding ourselves at ease in a
situation, with knowledge. The conception originated when
experimental knowing occurred only occasionally and as if
by accident; when discoveries were regarded as gifts of the
gods or as special inspirations: when men were governed by
custom and were uneasy in the presence of change and afraid
of the unknown. It was rationalized into a theory when the
Greeks succeeded in identifying natural phenomena with
rational ideas and were delighted with the identification because
their aesthetic interest made them at home in a world of
such harmony and order as that identification involved. They
M
178 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
called the result science, although in fact it fastened wrong
beliefs about nature upon Europe for wellnigh two thousand
years.
Newtonian science, as we have seen in another connection,
in effect only substituted one set of identifying objects, the
mathematical, for those previously employed. It set up per-
manent substances, the particles or atoms having inherent
mathematical properties, as ultimate realities, and alleged that
reflective thought yields knowledge when it translates pheno-
mena into these properties. Thus it retained unimpaired the
theory that knowing signifies a process of identification. It
required over two centuries for the experimental method to
reach a point where men were forced to realize that progress
in science depends upon choice of operations performed and
not upon the properties of objects which were alleged to be
so antecedently certain and fixed that all detailed phenomena
might be reduced to them. This conception of knowledge still
dominates thinking in social and moral matters. When it is
realized that in these fields as in the physical, we know what
we intentionally construct, that everything depends upon
determination of methods of operation and upon observation
of the consequences which test them, the progress of knowledge
in these affairs may also become secure and constant.
What has been said does not imply that previous knowledge
is not of immense importance in obtaining new knowledge.
What is denied is that this previous knowledge need be
immediate or intuitive, and that it provides the measure and
Standard of conclusions obtained by inferential operations.
Inferential inquiry is continuous; one phase passes into the
next, which uses, tests and expands conclusions already obtained .
More particularly, the conclusions of prior knowledge are the
instruments of new inquiries, not the norm which determines
their validity. Objects of previous knowledge supply working
hypotheses for new situations; they are the source of sug-
gestion of new operations; they direct inquiry. But they do
THE SEAT OF INTELLECTUAL AUTHORITY 179
not enter into reflective knowing by way of providing its
premises in a logical sense. The tradition of classic logic
persists in leading philosophers to call premises what in effect
are regulative and instrumental points of view for conducting
new observations.
We are constantly referring to what is already known to
get our bearings in any new situation. Unless there is some
reason to doubt whether presumptive knowledge is really
knowledge, we take it as a net product. It would be a waste
of time and energy to repeat the operations in virtue of which
the object is a known object unless there were ground for
suspecting its validity. Every adult, irrespective of whether he
is a man of science or not, carries in his head a large store
of things known in virtue of earlier operations. When a new
problem comes up, one habitually refers to what is already
known to get a start in dealing with it. Such objects, until we
have occasion to doubt them, are settled, assured; the given
situation is dubious, but they are secure. Hence we take them
for granted, we take them as a matter of course. Then if we
question them, we tend to fall back upon something else
already known. What is too easily overlooked (especially in
quest for certainty by attachment to the fixed) is that the
objects we thus fall back upon are themselves known in virtue
of previous operations of inferential inquiry and test, and
that their "immediacy" as objects of reference marks an
assured product of reflection. It is also overlooked that they
are referred to as instruments, rather than as fixed in and of
themselves. The case is similar to the use of tools previously
manufactured when we are dealing with the conditions of a
new situation ; only when they prove defective does invention
of new tools demand recurrence to the operations by which
they were originally constructed.
This act of taking and using objects already known is
practically justified; it is like eating a fruit without asking
how it was grown. But many theories of knowledge take this
i8o THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
retrospective use of things known in virtue of earlier operations
as typical of the nature of knowledge itself. Being reminded
of something we already know is taken as the pattern of all
knowing. When the thing of which we are now retrospectively
aware was in process of being known, it was prospective and
eventual to inquiry, not something already "given". And it
has cognitive force in a new inquiry whose objective and
ultimate object is now prospective. Taking what is already
known or pointing to it is no more a case of knowledge than
taking a chisel out of a tool-box is the making of the tool.
Because some theories of knowledge have taken the operations
that yield the known object to be merely mental or psychical
instead of overt redispositions of antecedent subject-matter
(and thus have terminated in some form of "idealism") is no
reason for denying the mediated character of all known
objects.
Thus we are led by another road to the conclusion that the
basic error of traditional theories of knowledge resides in the
isolation and fixation of some phase of the whole process of
inquiry in resolving problematic situations. Sometimes sense-
data are so taken; sometimes, conceptions; sometimes, objects
previously known. An episode in a series of operational acts
is fastened upon, and then in its isolation and consequent
fragmentary character is made the foundation of the theory
of knowing in its entirety.
Reflective knowing certainly involves identification. But
identity itself has to be defined operationally. There are as
many meanings of identity and identification as there are
types of operation by which they are determined. There is
identification of an object as a member of a class, of a plant
as belonging to a certain species : taxonomic identity. The classic
theory of definition took this to be the sole valid type of logical
definition. There are identifications that are historic, that are
concerned with individuals as such. They define the identity
of an individual throughout a series of successive temporal
THE SEAT OF INTELLECTUAL AUTHORITY 181
changes, while the other type is purely static. This kind of
identity is secured by operations that introduce temporal
continuity into what is otherwise discrete: it yields genetic
and generative definitions. For the identity of an individual
is constituted by continued absorption and incorporation of
materials previously external as in the growth of a person,
a nation or a social movement. It demands operations that
rcdispose and organize what antecedently exists. Identifications
effected by inferential operations are of this type. They are
not reductions of the new object or situations to terms of
something already known. Traditional theories treat them as
if they were of the static and subsumptive type.
Hence these theories have no way of accounting for the
discrimination and differentiation, the novel elements, involved
in the conclusions of inferential knowing. They must be viewed
as mere surds, cognitively speaking. Identifications through
processes of temporal growth are, on the contrary, differentia-
tions; new and previously external material is incorporated;
otherwise there is no growth, no development. All reflective
inquiry starts from a problematic situation, and no such
situation can be settled in its own terms. It evolves into a
resolved situation only by means of introduction of material
not found in the situation itself. Imaginative survey, comparison
with things already known, is the first step. This does not
eventuate in complete knowledge, however, until some overt
experimental act takes place by means of which an existential
incorporation and organization is brought about. Merely
"mental" revisions remain in the status of thought as distinct
from knowledge. Identification through operations that re-
arrange what is antecedently given is a process of additive
discrimination; it alone is synthetic in the true sense of that
word, involving likeness-and-difference.
Objective idealisms have insisted upon the conjoint presence
of identity and difference in objects of knowledge, as in the
doctrine of the "concrete universal' \ But they have ignored
i8a THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
the phase of temporal reconstruction with its necessity for
overt existential interaction.
A further implication of the experimental determination
of the known object concerns its office in the verification of
hypotheses. It is often supposed that the value of experiment
lies merely in the fact that it confirms, refutes or modifies a
hypothesis. From the standpoint of the personal interest of
the inquirer such an interpretation often holds good. He is
interested in a theory, and views the eventually disclosed
state of facts solely in its bearing upon the theory he is
entertaining. To him, at the time, the cognitive value of the
results of experimental operation lies in the test they afford
of the claims of his hypothesis. Even so, however, verification,
or the opposite, is attained only because experimentation effects
a transition of a problematical situation into a resolved one.
In this development new individual objects with new features
are brought to light. As far as the objective course of know-
ledge is concerned, as distinct from the personal interest of the
investigator, this result is the important one; in comparison
with it the verification of a hypothesis is secondary and
incidental. The institution of a new object of experience is
the essential fact. It would not occur to any one surveying
the body of scientific knowledge as a whole to think that its
value lay in the corroboration it provides for a number of
hypotheses. Taken in the large, the significance of the body
of subject-matter as a whole clearly resides in the fact that
it marks an added depth, range and fullness of meaning
conferred upon objects of ordinary experience.
This consequence is the only intelligible end that can be
assigned to processes of reflective inquiry. It marks again
that during their course hypotheses have gained increased
solidity. But the eventual object of activity with tools is not
to perfect tools, but is found in what tools accomplish, the
products they turn out. When a person working on the basis
of a certain idea succeeds in making an invention, his idea
THE SEAT OF INTELLECTUAL AUTHORITY 183
is verified. But verification was not the purpose of making
the invention, nor does it constitute its value when made.
The same may be said of physicians working upon a certain
hypothesis in cure of a disease. Only an ultra-specialist would
regard a successful outcome simply as verification of a theory.
Since a hypothesis is itself instrumental to inquiry, its verifi-
cation cannot constitute the whole significance of inquiry.
Hypotheses which have later been rejected have often proved
serviceable in discovery of new facts, and thus advanced
knowledge. A poor tool is often better than none at all. It has
even been doubted whether any hypothesis ever entertained
has not turned out later to have been erroneous in important
respects. It is still questioned whether many of the objects
of the most valuable and indispensable hypotheses in present
use have actual existence ; the existential status of the electron
is still, for example, a matter of controversy. In many cases,
as in the older theory of the nature of atoms, it is now clear that
their worth was independent of the existential status imputed
to their subject-matter; that indeed this imputation was irre-
levant and as far as it went injurious. As we have seen, progress
beyond the Newtonian scheme was made possible when the
ascription of antecedently existing inherent properties was
dropped out, and concepts were regarded as designations of
operations to be performed.
These considerations have a practical importance with respect
to the attitude of disdain often affected usually in behalf of
preservation of some dogma toward the course of science.
It is pointed out that scientific men are constantly engaged
in furbishing and refurbishing their theories, rejecting those
to which they have been devoted, and putting new ones in
their place only in time to reject these also. Then it is demanded
why we should put our trust in science self-confessed to be
unstable rather than in some old dogma which men have
contir"\ed to believe without change. It is overlooked that the
instability affects the intellectual apparatus which is employed,
1 84 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
conceptions which are frankly hypothetical. What remains and
is not discarded but is added to is the body of concrete know-
ledge and of definite controls constructed by conceptions no
longer tenable. No one would dream of reflecting adversely
upon the evolution of mechanical inventions because the
sickle had been discarded for the mowing-machine, and the
mechanized tractor substituted for the horse-drawn mower. We
are obviously confronted with betterment of the instrumen-
talities that are employed to secure consequences.
The adverse criticism of science just mentioned attaches
only to some of the philosophic interpretations which have
been advanced. If scientific conceptions were valid in the degree
in which they are revelations of antecedent properties of real
Being and existence (as the Newtonian scheme took them to
be), there would be something disturbing in their continual
revamping. The claim of any one of them to be valid would
suffer discredit. Not so, if they are instrumentalities which
direct operations of experimental observations, and if the
knowledge-property resides in conclusions. Fruits remain and
these fruits are the abiding advance of knowledge. Thus
the breaking down of the traditional barrier between theory,
supposed to be concerned with prior reality, and practice,
concerned with production of consequences, protects the actual
results of theory from cavil.
At the same time, it does away once for all with the grounds
upon which wholesale sceptical and agnostic philosophies have
rested. As long as theories of knowledge are framed in terms
of organs assigned to mind or consciousness, whether sense
or reason or any combination of the two, organs occupied, it is
alleged, in reproducing or grasping antecedent reality, there
will continue to exist such generalized sceptical philosophies.
Phenomenalism, which holds that impressions and ideas come
between the knower and things to be known, will have plenty
of support as long as sensations and ideas are supposed to be
valid only when they report to mind something prior to them.
THE SEAT OF INTELLECTUAL AUTHORITY 185
Phenomenalism may be objected to on the ground that data,
ideas, essences, are means of knowing, not its objects. But as
long as they are regarded as merely mental means rather than
as means which through overt acts effect actual redisposition
of antecedent things, the retort will have the character of an
arbitrary tour de force \ it will be a pious doctrine rather than
a conclusion empirically verified.
It is always in place to be doubtful or sceptical about par-
ticular items of supposed knowledge when evidence to the
contrary presents itself. There is no knowledge self-guaranteed
to be infallible, since all knowledge is the product of special
acts of inquiry. Agnosticism as confession of ignorance about
special matters, in the absence of adequate evidence, is not
only in place under such circumstances but is an act of
intellectual honesty. But such scepticism and agnosticism are
particular and depend upon special conditions; they are not
wholesale ; they do not issue from a generalized impeachment
of the adequacy of the organs of knowing to perform their
office. Theories which assume that the knowing subject, that
mind or consciousness, has an inherent capacity to disclose
reality, a capacity operating apart from any overt interactions
of the organism with surrounding conditions, are invitations
to general philosophical doubt.
The case stands radically otherwise when it is seen that
"mental" states and acts are organs of knowing things not
directly but through the overt actions which they evoke and
direct. For, the consequences of these acts constitute the object
said to be known; and these consequences are public and
open. Doubt and scepticism attach only to the adequacy of
the operations used in achieving the issue which transforms
a problematic situation into a settled or resolved one. Instead
of being impotent and paralysing, they are opportunities for
bettering concrete methods of inquiry.
Once more, we recur to the problem raised concerning the
possibility of carrying over the essential elements of the pattern
1 86 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
of experimental knowing into the experience of man in its
everyday traits. A statement that judgments about regulative
ends and values, the creeds that are to govern conduct in its
important interests, are upon the whole matters of tradition,
dogma and imposition from alleged authorities, hardly requires
argument in its support. It is equally patent that scepticism
is rife as to the value of purposes and policies of life thus
supplied ; the scepticism often extends to complete agnosticism
as to the possibility of any regulative ends and standards
whatever. The course of human experience in such matters
is supposed to be inherently chaotic. Even more precious than
the special conclusions of scientific inquiry is its proof that
intelligent experimental inquiry is possible which, when it is
used, will develop expansion of ideas and regulation of securely
tested consequences. It is, once more, a hypothesis rather than
a settled fact that extension and transfer of experimental
method is generally possible. But like other hypotheses it is
to be tried in action, and the future history of mankind is
at stake in the trial.
CHAPTER VIII
THE NATURALIZATION OF INTELLIGENCE
EVERY STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY is aware of the number of
seeming impasses into which the theory of knowledge has been
led. There are four general types of subject-matter whose
rival claims to be the objects of true knowledge have to be
either disposed of or in some way accommodated to one
another. At one pole are immediate sense-data which are said
to be the immediate and accordingly most certain objects in
knowledge of existence: the original material from which
knowledge of nature must set out. At the other pole are
mathematical and logical objects. Somewhere between them
lie the objects of physical science, the products of an elaborate
technique of reflective inquiry. Then there are the objects of
everyday experience, the concrete things of the world in which
we live and which, from the standpoint of our practical affairs,
our enjoyments and sufferings, form the world we live in.
To common sense these are the most important if not the
most real of all objects of knowing. Recent philosophy has
been increasingly occupied with the problems which grow out
of the titles of these various kinds of objects to jurisdiction
over the field of knowledge. From some point of view, the
pretensions of each seem to be supreme.
The problem, however, is far from being a purely technical
one. There has been repeated occasion to note that the claim
of physical objects, the objects in which the physical sciences
terminate, to constitute the real nature of the world, places the
objects of value with which our affections and choices are
concerned at an invidious disadvantage. The mathematician
often doubts the claims of physics to be a science in the full
sense of the word ; the psychologist may quarrel with both ;
and the devotees of physical inquiry are suspicious of the
claims of those who deal with human affairs, historians and
188 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
students of social life. The biological subjects which stand
between and form a connecting link are often refused the title
of science if they adopt principles and categories different
from those of strict physics. The net practical effect is the
creation of the belief that science exists only in the things
which are most remote from any significant human concern, so
that as we approach social and moral questions and interests
we must either surrender hope of the guidance of genuine
knowledge or else purchase a scientific title and authority at
the expense of all that is distinctly human.
Those who have followed the previous discussions will not
be surprised to hear that, from the standpoint of experimental
knowing, all of the rivalries and connected problems grow
from a single root. They spring from the assumption that the
true and valid object of knowledge is that which has being
prior to and independent of the operations of knowing. They
spring from the doctrine that knowledge is a grasp or behold-
ing of reality without anything being done to modify its
antecedent state the doctrine which is the source of the
separation of knowledge from practical activity. If we see that
knowing is not the act of an outside spectator but of a partici-
pator inside the natural and social scene, then the true object
of knowledge resides in the consequences of directed action.
When we take this point of view, if only by way of a hypo-
thesis, the perplexities and difficulties of which we have
been speaking vanish. For on this basis there will be as many
kinds of known objects as there are kinds of effectively con-
ducted operations of inquiry which result in the consequences
intended.
The result of one operation will be as good and true an
object of knowledge as is any other, provided it is good at all :
provided, that is, it satisfies the conditions which induced
the inquiry. For if consequences are the object of know-
ing, then an archetypal antecedent reality is not a model to
which the conclusions of inquiry must conform. One might
THE NATURALIZATION OF INTELLIGENCE 189
even go as far as to say that there are as many kinds of
valid knowledge as there are conclusions wherein distinctive
operations have been employed to solve the problems set by
antecedently experienced situations. For operations dealing
with different problems never exactly repeat one another and
do not determine exactly the same consequences. However, as
far as logical theory is concerned, operations fall into certain
kinds or types. It is the bearing of our principle upon the
validity of these kinds that we are directly concerned with.
It is only repeating what has been said to assert that no
problem can be solved without a determination of the data
which define and locate it and which furnish clues or evidence.
In so far, when we secure dependable sense-data, we know
truly. Again, the systematic progress of inquiry in dealing
with physical problems requires that we determine those metric
properties by means of which correlations of changes are
instituted so as to make predictions possible. These form the
objects of physical science, and if our operations are adequate
they are truly known. We develop operations, through symbols,
which connect possible operations with one another; their
outcome gives the formal objects of mathematics and logic.
As consequences of suitable operations these too are truly
known. Finally, when these operations, or some combination
of them, are used to solve the problems which arise in con-
nection with the things of ordinary perceived and enjoyed
objects, the latter, as far as they are consequences of these
operations, are themselves truly known. We know whenever
we do know; that is, whenever our inquiry leads to conclusions
which settle the problem out of which it grew. This truism
is the end of the whole matter upon the condition that we
frame our theory of knowledge in accord with the pattern set
by experimental methods.
The conclusions, however, are not truistic; they certainly
are not trivial. The more complex the conditions with which
operations are concerned, the fuller and richer are their conse-
i 9 o THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
quences. Consequently, the more significant, although not the
truer, is the resulting knowledge. The advantage of physical
knowledge depends upon the fact that it deals with fewer
conditions, those of a narrower and more isolated range, by
means of operations that are more precise and more technical.
There is no difference in principle between knowledge of them
and knowledge of the most complex human affairs, but there
is a decided practical difference. To be an object of specifically
physical knowledge is the same thing as being an object of
operations that discriminate definitely fundamental relations
of the experienced world from others, and that deal with them
in their discriminated character. The gain is great. But the
objects thus known lay no claim to be final. When used
as factors for inquiring into phenomena of life and society
they become instrumental; they cease to be inclusive, and
become part of a method for understanding more complex
phenomena.
From this point of view, the objects of our common-sense
world (by which is signified that in which we live, with our
loves and hates, our defeats and achievements, our choices,
strivings and enjoyments) have a double status. When they
precede operations of competent directed inquiry, they are not
matters of knowledge; they are experienced just as they
happen to occur. They thus set problems for inquiry, problems
of varied scope. But they are of such a nature that things of
the most limited range, the purely physical, are the first to be
successfully dealt with. But in the degree in which fuller and
more complex social and moral affairs which of course in-
clude physical and biological conditions and relations within
themselves are transformed by becoming consequences of
operations made possible by the limited forms of knowing,
they also are objects of knowledge. While they are not more
real, they are richer and more significant objects than are those
of any other type of knowledge.
The special results of science are alwavs finding their wav
THE NATURALIZATION OF INTELLIGENCE 191
back into the natural and social environment of daily life and
modifying it. This fact does not of itself cause the latter to
be known objects. A typical example is the effect of physical
science upon a worker in a factory; he may merely become
an attachment to a machine for a number of hours a day.
Physical science has had its effect in changing social conditions.
But there has been no correspondingly significant increase of
intelligent understanding. The application of physical know-
ledge has taken place in a technical way for the sake of limited
consequences. But when the operations in which physical
science is used are such as to transform distinctively human
values in behalf of a human interest, those who participate in
these consequences have a knowledge of the things of ordinary
perception, use and enjoyment as genuine and fuller and
deeper than that of the scientist in his laboratory. Were we to
define science not in the usual technical way, but as a know-
ledge that accrues when methods are employed which deal
competently with problems that present themselves, the
physician, engineer, artist, craftsman, lay claim to scientific
knowing.
These statements go contrary to the philosophic tradition.
They do so for just one reason. They rest upon the idea that
known objects exist as the consequences of directed operations,
not because of conformity of thought or observation with
something antecedent. We may, for reasons which I hope will
appear later, give the name intelligence to these directed
operations. Using this term, we may say that the worth of
any object that lays claim to being an object of knowledge is
dependent upon the intelligence employed in reaching it. In
saying this, we must bear in mind that intelligence means
operations actually performed in the modification of condi-
tions, including all the guidance that is given by means of
ideas, both direct and symbolic.
The statement may sound strange. But it is only a way
of saying that the value of any cognitive conclusion depends
192 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
upon the method by which it is reached, so that the perfecting
of method, the perfecting of intelligence, is the thing of
supreme value. If we judge the work of a scientific inquirer by
what he does and not by his speech when he talks about his
work (when he is likely to talk in terms of traditional notions
that have become habitual) we shall have little difficulty, I
think, in accepting the idea that he determines the cognitive
claims of anything presented to him on the basis of the method
by which it is reached. The import of this doctrine is simple.
It becomes complicated, however, the moment we contrast it
with the doctrines which have dominated thought. For these
all rest on the notion that a reality in Being independently
of the operations of inquiry is the standard and measure of
anything said to be known. Viewed in this connection, the
conception just advanced involves hardly less than a revolu-
tionary transformation of many of our most cherished con-
victions. The essential difference is that between a mind which
beholds or grasps objects from outside the world of things,
physical and social, and one which is a participant, interacting
with other things and knowing them provided the interaction
is regulated in a definable way.
In discussion up to this point we have depended upon the
general pattern of experimental knowing. It is asserted that
when we frame our theory of knowledge and the known object
after this pattern, the conclusion is inevitable. But the point
is of such importance that we may gratefully acknowledge the
support given the conclusion by one of the definite conclusions
reached in recent physical science. For this one result is of a
crucially decisive nature. It is known technically as Heisen-
berg's principle of indeterminancy. The basic philosophy of
the Newtonian system of the universe is closely connected
with what is termed the principle of canonic conjugates. The
fundamental principle of the mechanical philosophy of nature
is that it is possible to determine exactly (in principle if not
in actual practice) both the position and the velocitv of anv
THE NATURALIZATION OF INTELLIGENCE 193
body. Knowing this for each particle which enters into any
change, as a motion, it is possible to calculate mathematically,
that is exactly, just what will happen. The laws or physical
equations that express the relations of the particles and bodies
under different conditions are then assumed to be a "govern-
ing" framework of nature to which all particular phenomena
conform. Knowing volumes and momenta in a particular case
we can by the aid of fixed laws predict the subsequent course
of events.
The philosophy in question assumed that these positions
and velocities are there in nature independent of our knowing,
of our experiments and observations, and that we have scien-
tific knowledge in the degree in which we ascertain them
exactly. The future and the past belong to the same com-
pletely determinate and fixed scheme. Observations, when
correctly conducted, merely register this fixed state of changes
according to laws of objects whose essential properties are
fixed. The implications of the positions are expressed in
Laplace's well-known saying that were there a knowledge (in
mechanical terms) of the state of the universe at any one time
its whole future could be predicted or deduced. It is this
philosophy which Heisenberg's principle has upset, a fact
implied in calling it a principle of indeterminancy.
It is true that critics had attacked the Newtonian scheme
on the basis of a logical flaw in it. It first postulates that the
position and velocity of any particle can be determined in
isolation from all others. Then it postulates that there is a
complete and continuous interaction of all these particles with
one another. Logically, the two postulates nullify each other.
But as long as the principles involved gave satisfactory results
this objection was brushed aside or ignored. Heisenberg's prin-
ciple compels a recognition of the fact that interaction prevents
an accurate measurement of velocity and position for any body,
the demonstration centring about the role of the interaction of
the observer in determining what actually happens.
N
194 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY '
The scientific data and the mathematical reasonings which
led him to his conclusion are technical. But fortunately they
do not concern us. The logic of the matter is not complicated.
He showed that if we fix, metrically, velocity, then there is a
range of indeterminateness in the assignment of position, and
vice versa. When one is fixed, the other is defined only within
a specified limit of probability. The element of indeterminate-
ness is not connected with defect in the method of observation,
but is intrinsic. The particle observed does not have fixed
position or velocity, for it is changing all the time because
of interaction: specifically, in this case, interaction with the
act of observing, or more strictly, with the conditions under
which an observation is possible; for it is not the "mental"
phase of observation which makes the difference. Since either
position or velocity may be fixed at choice, leaving the element
of indeterminancy on the other side, both of them are shown
to be conceptual in nature. That is, they belong to our intellec-
tual apparatus for dealing with antecedent existence, not to
fixed properties of that existence. An isolation of a particle
for measurement is essentially a device for regulation of sub-
sequent perceptual experience.
Technically, the principle of Heisenberg is connected with
recent determinations regarding observation of phenomena of
light. The principle as far as the role of the conditions of
observation is concerned is simple. We should all, I suppose,
recognize that when we perceive an object by means of touch,
the contact introduces a slight modification in the thing
touched. Although in dealing with large bodies this change
would be insignificant, it would be considerable if we touched
a minute body and one moving at high speed. It might be
thought that we could calculate the displacement thus effected,
and by making allowances for it determine exactly the position
and momentum of the thing touched. But this result would be
theoretical, and would have to be confirmed by another obser-
vation. The effect of the last observation cannot be eliminated.
THE NATURALIZATION OF INTELLIGENCE 195
Failure to generalize this conclusion was due presumably to
two facts. Until recently physics dealt mainly with bodies of
relatively large volume and relatively low velocity. Experiences
with these bodies were carried over to minute particles of any
velocity; these were treated as mathematical points located at
fixed, unchanging instants of time. The second cause is that
vision does not involve interaction with the thing seen as
obviously as does touch.
But the situation changed when it came to dealing with
minute bodies moving at high speed. Also, it became clear
that a continuous field or even flow of light cannot be ob-
served and measured. Light can be observed only as an indi-
vidual object, a drop, pellet or bullet. The presence of at
least one such bullet is required to make, say, an electron
visible, and its action displaces to some extent the object
observed ; the displacement or jog, being involved in the ob-
servation, cannot be measured by it. As Bridgman says: "A
cat may look at a king, but at least one bullet of light must
pass if any light at all passes, and the king cannot be observed
without the exertion of that minimum amount of mechanical
repulsion which corresponds to the single bullet." 1
To a layman the full import of the discovery may not
seem at first sight very great. In the subject-matter of scientific
thought it calls for only slight changes of formulation, in-
significant for all macroscopic bodies. The change for the
underlying philosophy and logic of science is, however, very
great. In relation to the metaphysics of the Newtonian system
it is hardly less than revolutionary. What is known is seen to
be a product in which the act of observation plays a necessary
role. Knowing is seen to be a participant in what is finally
known. Moreover, the metaphysics of existence as something
fixed and therefore capable of literally exact mathematical
description and prediction is undermined. Knowing is, for
1 In the March 1929 number of Harper's Magazine, in an article
entitled "The New Vision of Science".
i 9 6 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
philosophical theory, a case of specially directed activity
instead of something isolated from practice. The quest for
certainty by means of exact possession in mind of immutable
reality is exchanged for search for security by means of active
control of the changing course of events. Intelligence in opera-
tion, another name for method, becomes the thing most worth
winning.
The principle of indetcrminancy thus presents itself as the
final step in the dislodgment of the old spectator theory of
knowledge. It marks the acknowledgment, within scientific
procedure itself, of the fact that knowing is one kind of inter-
action which goes on within the world. Knowing marks the
conversion of undirected changes into changes directed toward
an intended conclusion. There are left for philosophy but two
alternatives. Either knowledge defeats its own purpose ; or the
objective of knowing is the consequences of operations pur-
posely undertaken, provided they fulfil the conditions for the
sake of which they are carried on. If we persist in the tradi-
tional conception, according to which the thing to be known is
something which exists prior to and wholly apart from the act
of knowing, then discovery of the fact that the act of observa-
tion, necessary in existential knowing, modifies that pre-
existent something, is proof that the act of knowing gets in its
own way, frustrating its own intent. If knowing is a form of
doing and is to be judged like other modes by its eventual
issue, this tragic conclusion is not forced upon us. Funda-
mentally, the issue is raised whether philosophy is willing to
surrender a theory of mind and its organs of knowing which
originated when the practice of knowing was in its infancy.
One important result of acknowledgment of the philosophic
modification involved in the principle of indeterminancy is a
definite change in our conception of natural laws. The indi-
vidually observed case becomes the measure of knowledge.
Laws are intellectual instrumentalities by which that individual
object is instituted and its meaning determined. This change
THE NATURALIZATION OF INTELLIGENCE 197
involves a reversal of the theory which has dominated thought
since the Newtonian system obtained full sway. According to
the latter, the aim of science is to ascertain laws; individual
cases are known only as they are reduced to instances of laws.
For, as we saw earlier, the Newtonian philosophy allowed
itself to become entangled in the Greek metaphysics, according
to which the immutable is the truly real and our thought is
adequate in the degree in which it approximates a grasp of
what is antecedently fixed in existence.
In content, or subject-matter, Newton's philosophy effected
a revolutionary change. The unchanging reality had been
thought to consist of forms and species. According to New-
tonian science, it consists of fixed relations, temporal and
spatial, designated by exact enumeration of changes between
fixed ultimate substances, the masses of atoms. The discovery
that mass varies with velocity was the beginning of the end.
It deprived physical knowledge of its supposedly ultimate
permanent coefficient, one having nothing to do with con-
figuration or motion, and one in terms of which all interactions
were to be exactly described. All "laws" were statements of
these ultimate and rigid uniformities of being. While perhaps
there was felt to be something metaphorical in speaking of
laws as if they "governed" changes and of the latter as if they
"obeyed" laws, there was nothing figurative in the notion that
laws stated the ultimate unchanging properties of natural
existence, and that all individual cases, those observed, were
only specimen instances of the antecedent properties of the real
world formulated in laws. The principle of indeterminancy
brings to fruition the scientific transformation initiated in the
discovery that the supposition of a permanent coefficient of
mass is illusory a survival, when judged in historical terms,
of the old notion that something immutable is the true object
of knowledge.
In technical statement, laws on the new basis are formulae
for the prediction of the probability of an observable occur-
i 9 8 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
rence. They are designations of relations sufficiently stable to
allow of the occurrence of forecasts of individualized situa-
tions for every observed phenomenon is individual within
limits of specified probability, not a probability of error, but of
probability of actual occurrence. Laws are inherently concep-
tual in character, as is shown in the fact that either position or
velocity may be fixed at will. To call them conceptual is not to
say that they are merely "mental" and arbitrary. It is to say
they they are relations which are thought not observed. The
subject-matter of the conceptions which constitute laws is not
arbitrary, for it is determined by the interactions of what
exists. But determination of them is very different from that
denoted by conformity to fixed properties of unchanging
substances. Any instrument which is to operate effectively in
existence must take account of what exists, from a fountain-
pen to a self-binding reaper, a locomotive or an aeroplane.
But "taking account of", paying heed to, is something quite
different from literal conformity to what is already in being. It
is an adaptation of what previously existed to accomplishment
of a purpose.
The eventual purpose in knowledge is observation of a new
phenomenon, an object actually experienced by way of per-
ception. Thus the supposed immutable law supposed to govern
phenomena becomes a way of transacting business effectively
with concrete existences, a mode of regulation of our relations
with them. There is no difference in principle between their use
in "pure" science and in an art. We may recur to the case of
a physician to which reference was made. The physician in
diagnosing a case of disease deals with something indi-
vidualized. He draws upon a store of general principles of
physiology, etc., already at command. Without this store of
conceptual material he is helpless. But he does not attempt to
reduce the case to an exact specimen of certain laws of physio-
logy and pathology, or do away with its unique individuality.
Rather he uses general statements as aids to direct his obser-
THE NATURALIZATION OF INTELLIGENCE 199
vation of the particular case, so as to discover what it is like.
They function as intellectual tools or instrumentalities.
The recognition that laws are means of calculating the
probability of observation of an event signifies that in basic
logic there is no difference in the two kinds of cases. The full
and eventual reality of knowledge is carried in the individual
case, not in general laws isolated from use in giving an indi-
vidual case its meaning. Thus the empirical or observational
theory of knowledge comes to its own, although in quite a
different way from that imagined by traditional empiricism.
It is an old remark that human progress is a zigzag affair.
The idea of a universal reign of law, based on properties im-
mutably inhering in things and of such a nature as to be capable
of exact mathematical statement, was a sublime idea. It dis-
placed once for all the notion of a world in which the un-
accountable and the mysterious have the first and last word,
a world in which they constantly insert themselves. It estab-
lished the ideal of regularity and uniformity in place of the
casual and sporadic. It gave men inspiration and guidance in
seeking for uniformities and constancies where only irregular
diversity was experienced. The ideal extended itself from the
inanimate world to the animate and then to social affairs. It
became, it may fairly be said, the great article of faith in the
creed of scientific men. From this point of view, the principle
of indeterminancy seems like an intellectual catastrophe. In
compelling surrender of the doctrine of exact and immutable
laws describing the fixed antecedent properties of things, it
seems to involve abandonment of the idea that the world is
fundamentally intelligible. A universe in which fixed laws do
not make possible exact predictions seems from the older
standpoint to be a world in which disorder reigns.
The feeling is psychologically natural. But it arises from
the hold which intellectual habits have over us. The traditional
conception displaced in fact lingers in imagination as a picture
of what the world ought to be ; we are uneasy because the fact
200 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
turns out not to be in accord with the picture in our minds.
As a matter of fact, the change, viewed in a perspective of
distance, is nothing like so upsetting. All the facts that were
ever known are still known, and known with greater accuracy
than before. The older doctrine was in effect an offshoot not
of science but of a metaphysical doctrine which taught that
the immutable is the truly real, and of a theory of knowledge
which held that rational conceptions rather than observations
are the vehicle of knowledge. Newton foisted a fundamental
"rationalism" upon the scientific world all the more effectually
because he did it in the name of empirical observation.
Moreover, like all generalizations which go beyond the
range of possible as well as of actual experience, a price was
paid for the sublime and inspiring ideal of a reign of uni-
versal and exact law: the sacrifice of the individual to the
general, of the concrete to the relational. Spinoza's magnifi-
cently sweeping dictum that "the order and connection of ideas
is the order and connection of things" was in effect, although
not avowedly as it was with Spinoza, the current measure of
the intelligibility of nature. And a universe whose essential
characteristic is fixed order and connection has no place for
unique and individual existences, no place for novelty and
genuine change and growth. It is, in the words of William
James, a block universe. The fact that in detailed content it
is a thoroughly mechanistic world is, one may say, a mere
incident attending the fact that it is a fixed and closed world.
Probably everyone has heard of the child who expressed
surprise at the fact that rivers or bodies of water are always
located conveniently near great cities. Suppose every one had
had engrained in his mind the notion that cities, like rivers,
are works of nature. Suppose it was then suddenly ascertained
that cities were man made and were located near bodies of
water in order that the activities of men in industry and com-
merce might be better carried on and human purposes and
needs be better served. We can imagine that the discovery
THE NATURALIZATION OF INTELLIGENCEj 201
would bring with it a shock. It would be upsetting because
it would seem unnatural; for the ordinary measure of the
natural is psychological ; it is what we have become accustomed
to. But in time the new idea in becoming familiar would also
become "natural". If men had always previously conceived of
the connection between cities and rivers as one which was in-
trinsic and fixed by nature, instead of being a product of human
art, it is moreover probable that in time a liberation would be
experienced by discovery that the contrary was the case. Men
would be led to take fuller advantage of the facilities afforded
by natural conditions. These would be used in new and more
diversified ways when it was realized that cities were near
them because of and for the sake of the uses they provide.
The analogy suggested seems to me close. From the stand-
point of traditional notions, it appears that nature, intrinsically,
is irrational. But the quality of irrationality is imputed only
because of conflict with a prior definition of rationality.
Abandon completely the notion that nature ought to conform
to a certain definition, and nature intrinsically is neither
rational nor irrational. Apart from the use made of it in know-
ing, it exists in a dimension irrelevant to either attribution,
just as rivers inherently are neither located near cities nor are
opposed to such location. Nature is intelligible and under-
standflife. There are operations by means of which it becomes
an object of knowledge, and is turned to human purposes, just
as rivers provide conditions which may be utilized to promote
human activities and to satisfy human need.
Moreover, just as commerce, carried on by natural bodies
of water, signifies interactions within nature, by which changes
are effected in natural conditions the building of docks and
harbours, erection of warehouses and factories, construction of
steamships and also in invention of new modes of interaction
so with knowing and knowledge. The organs, instrumentalities
and operations of knowing are inside nature, not outside.
Hence they are changes of what previously existed : the object
203 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
of knowledge is a constructed, existentially produced object.
The shock to the traditional notion that knowledge is perfect
in the degree in which it grasps or beholds without change
some thing previously complete in itself is tremendous. But
in effect it only makes us aware of what we have always done,
as far as ever we have actually succeeded in knowing : it clears
away superfluous and irrelevant accompaniments and it con-
centrates attention upon the agencies which are actually effec-
tive in obtaining knowledge, eliminating waste and making
actual knowing more controllable. In installs man, thinking
man, within nature.
The doctrine that nature is inherently rational was a costly
one. It entailed the idea that reason in man is an outside spec-
tator of a rationality already complete in itself. It deprived
reason in man of an active and creative office ; its business was
simply to copy, to re-present symbolically, to view a given
rational structure. Ability to make a transcript of this structure
in mathematical formulae gives great delight to those who
have the required ability. But it does nothing; it makes no
difference in nature. In effect, it limits thought in man to
retraversing in cognition a pattern fixed and complete in itself.
The doctrine was both an effect of the traditional separation
between knowledge and action and a factor in perpetuating it.
It relegated practical making and doing to a secondary and
relatively irrational realm.
Its paralysing effect on human action is seen in the part
it played in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the
theory of "natural laws" in human affairs, in social matters.
These natural laws were supposed to be inherently fixed; a
science of social phenomena and relations was equivalent to
discovery of them. Once discovered, nothing remained for
man but to conform to them ; they were to rule his conduct as
physical laws govern physical phenomena. They were the sole
standard of conduct in economic affairs ; the laws of economics
are the "natural" laws of all political action; other so-called
THE NATURALIZATION OF INTELLIGENCE 203
laws are artificial, man-made contrivances in contrast with the
normative regulations of nature itself.
Laissez-faire was the logical conclusion. For organized society
to attempt to regulate the course of economic affairs, to bring
them into service of humanly conceived ends, was a harmful
interference.
This doctrine is demonstratively the offspring of that con-
ception of universal laws that phenomena must observe which
was a heritage of the Newtonian philosophy. But if man in
knowing is a participator in the natural scene, a factor in genera-
ting things known, the fact that man participates as a factor
in social affairs is no barrier to knowledge of them. On the
contrary, a certain method of directed participation is a pre-
condition of his having any genuine understanding. Human
intervention for the sake of effecting ends is no interference,
and it is a means of knowledge.
There is thus involved more than a verbal shift if we say
that the new scientific development effects an exchange of
reason for intelligence. In saying this, "reason" has the tech-
nical meaning given to it in classic philosophic tradition, the
nous of the Greeks, the intellectus of the scholastics. In this
meaning, it designates both an inherent immutable order of
nature, superempirical in character, and the organ of mind by
which this universal order is grasped. In both respects, reason
is with respect to changing things the ultimate fixed standard
the law physical phenomena obey, the norm human action
should obey. For the marks of "reason" in its traditional sense
are necessity, universality, superiority to change, domination
of the occurrence and the understanding of change.
Intelligence on the other hand is associated with judgment ;
that is, with selection and arrangement of means to effect con-
sequences and with choice of what we take as our ends. A man
is intelligent not in virtue of having reason which grasps first
and indemonstrable truths about fixed principles, in order to
reason deductively from them to the particulars which they
204 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
govern, but in virtue of his capacity to estimate the possibili-
ties of a situation and to act in accordance with his estimate.
In the large sense of the term, intelligence is as practical as
reason is theoretical. Wherever intelligence operates, things
are judged in their capacity of signs of other things. If scien-
tific knowledge enables us to estimate more accurately the
worth of things as signs, we can afford to exchange a loss of
theoretical certitude for a gain in practical judgment. For if
we can judge events as indications of other events, we can
prepare in all cases for the coming of what is anticipated. In
some cases, we can forestall a happening; desiring one event
to happen rather than another, we can intentionally set about
institution of those changes which our best knowledge tells us
to be connected with that which we are after.
What has been lost in the theoretical possibility of exact
knowledge and exact prediction is more than compensated for
by the fact that the knowing which occurs within nature
involves possibility of direction of change. This conclusion
gives intelligence a foothold and a function within nature
which " reason " never possessed. That which acts outside of
nature and is a mere spectator of it is, by definition, not a
participator in its changes. Therefore it is debarred from taking
part in directing them. Action may follow, but it is only an
external attachment to knowing, not an inherent factor in it.
As a mechanical addendum, it is inferior to knowledge. More-
over, it must either issue automatically from knowledge or else
there must be some intervening act of "will" to produce it.
In any case, because of its externality it adds nothing to intelli-
gence or knowledge. It can only increase personal shrewdness
in prudential manipulation of conditions.
We may, indeed, engage during knowing in experimenta-
tion. But according to the classic logic the effect was not to
reorganize prior conditions, but merely to bring about a change
in our own subjective or mental attitude. The act no more
entered into the constitution of the known object than travel-
THE NATURALIZATION OF INTELLIGENCE 205
ling to Athens to see the Parthenon had any effect on archi-
tecture. It makes a change in our own personal attitude and
posture so that we can see better what was there all the time.
It is a practical concession to the weakness of our powers
of apprehension. The whole scheme hangs together with the
traditional depreciation of practical activity on the part of the
intellectual class. In reality, it also condemns intelligence to a
position of impotency. Its exercise is an enjoyable use of
leisure. The doctrine of its supreme value is largely a com-
pensation for the impotency that attached to it in contrast with
the force of executive acts.
The realization that the observation necessary to knowledge
enters into the natural object known cancels this separation
of knowing and doing. It makes possible and it demands a
theory in which knowing and doing are intimately connected
with each other. Hence, as we have said, it domesticates the
exercise of intelligence within nature. This is part and parcel
of nature's own continuing interactions. Interactions go on
anyway and produce changes. Apart from intelligence, these
changes are not directed. They are effects but not consequences,
for consequences imply means deliberately employed. When
an interaction intervenes which directs the course of change,
the scene of natural interaction has a new quality and dimen-
sion. This added type of interaction is intelligence. The intelli-
gent activity of man is not something brought to bear upon
nature from without; it is nature realizing its own poten-
tialities in behalf of a fuller and richer issue of events. Intelli-
gence within nature means liberation and expansion, as reason
outside of nature means fixation and restriction.
The change does not mean that nature has lost intelligi-
bility. It rather signifies that we are in position to realize that
the term intelligible is to be understood literally. It expresses
a potentiality rather than an actuality. Nature is capable of
being understood. But the possibility is realized not by a mind
thinking about it from without but by operations conducted
206 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
from within, operations which give it new relations summed
up in production of a new individual object. Nature has in-
telligible order as its possession in the degree in which we by
our own overt operations realize potentialities contained in it.
The change from intrinsic rationality in the traditional sense
to an intelligibility to be realized by human action places
responsibility upon human beings. The devotion we show to
the ideal of intelligence determines the extent in which the
actual order of nature is congenial to mind.
These conclusions connect directly with the question raised
at the outset of this chapter. When knowledge is defined from
the standpoint of a reality to which the conclusions of thought
must accommodate themselves, as a photograph must be faith-
ful to its original, there will always be disputes as to whether
this or that subject can possibly be treated scientifically. But
if the measure of knowledge is the quality of intelligence
manifested in dealing with problems presented by any ex-
perienced subject-matter, the issue takes on a different aspect.
The question always at issue is the possibility of developing
a method adequate to cope with problems. The conclusions of
physical knowledge do indeed set a standard for knowing. But
it is because of their elaboration of competent method that
this statement is true, not because of any superior claim to
reality on the part of physical subject-matter. All materials
of experience are equally real; that is, all are existential; each
has a right to be dealt with in terms of its own especial charac-
teristics and its own problems. To use philosophical ter-
minology, each type of subject-matter is entitled to its own
characteristic categories, according to the questions it raises and
the operations necessary to answer them.
The difference between various types of knowledge thus
turns out to be a difference in fullness and range of conditions
involved in subject-matter dealt with. When one considers the
success of astronomy in attaining understanding of phenomena
occurring at enormous distances one may well be lost in
THE NATURALIZATION OF INTELLIGENCE 207
admiration. But we should also reflect upon how much is omitted
from inquiry and conclusion. Our knowledge of human affairs
on this earth is inexact and unorganized as compared with
some things which we know about bodies distant many, many
light-years. But there are vast multitudes of things about these
bodies that astronomy makes no pretence of inquiring into.
The relative perfection of its conclusions is connected with the
strict limitation of the problems it deals with. The case of
astronomy is typical of physical science in general as compared
with knowledge of human affairs. The essence of the latter is
that we cannot indulge in the selective abstractions that are
the secret of the success of physical knowing. When we intro-
duce a like simplification into social and moral subjects we
eliminate the distinctively human factors: reduction to the
physical ensues.
The principle is exemplified in the difference which is found
between results obtained in the laboratory and in manufac-
turing processes carried on for commercial purposes. The same
materials and relations may be involved. But under laboratory
conditions elements are isolated and treated under a control
not possible in the factory, where the same rigid isolation
would defeat the aim of cheap production on a large scale.
Nevertheless, in the end, the researches of scientific inquiries
transform industrial production. Possibilities of new operations
are suggested, and the laboratory results indicate ways of
eliminating wasteful operations and make manifest conditions
which have to be attended to. Artificial simplification or ab-
straction is a necessary precondition of securing ability to deal
with affairs which are complex, in which there are many more
variables and where strict isolation destroys the special charac-
teristics of the subject-matter. This statement conveys the
important distinction which exists between physical and social
and moral objects. The distinction is one of methods of
operation, not of kinds of reality.
In other words, what is meant by "physical" in distinction
208 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
from other adjectives that are prefixed to subject-matter is
precisely an abstraction of a limited range of conditions and
relations out of a total complex. The same principle applies to
mathematical objects. The use of symbols designating possible
operations makes possible a greater degree of exactness and
intellectual organization. There is no disparagement of ab-
straction involved. Abstraction is simply an instance of the
economy and efficiency involved in all intelligent practice:
deal first with matters that can be effectively handled, and
then use the results to go on to cope with more complex affairs.
Objection comes in, and comes in with warranted force, when
the results of an abstractive operation are given a standing
which belongs only to the total situation from which they
have been selected. All specialization breeds a familiarity
which tends to create an illusion. Material dealt with by
specialized abstractive processes comes to have a psychological
independence and completion which is converted hyposta-
tized into objective independence and self-sufficiency.
In addition there is a definite social reason for abstractive
simplification. Intercourse of human individuals with one
another makes it necessary to find common ground. Just
because individuals are individuals, there is much in the ex-
perience of each which is unique; being incommunicable in
and of itself, it is in so far a bar to entering into relations
with others. For the purposes of communication, dissection is
necessary. Otherwise the personal element is a bar to agree-
ment and understanding. If one follows out this line of
thought, it will be evident that the more widely extended is
the notion of mutual comprehensibility, the more completely
all individual traits tend to get excluded from the object of
thought. In arriving at statements which hold for all possible
experiencers and observers under all possible varying indi-
vidual circumstances we arrive at that which is most remote
from any one concrete experience. In this sense, the abstrac-
tions of mathematics and ohvsics renresent the common
THE NATURALIZATION OF INTELLIGENCE 209
denominators in all things experienceable. Taken by themselves
they seem to present a caput mortuum. Erected into complete
statements of reality as such, they become hallucinatory obses-
sions. But in practice, there is always an accompanying reverse
movement. These generalized findings are employed to enrich
the meanings of individualized experiences, and to afford,
within limits of probability, an increased control of them.
It is in this sense that all reflective knowledge as such is
instrumental. The beginning and the end is the things of gross
everyday experience. But apart from knowledge the things of
our ordinary experience are fragmentary, casual, unregulated
by purpose, full of frustrations and barriers. In the language
previously used, they are problematic, obstructive, and chal-
lenges to thought. By ignoring for a time their concrete and
qualitative fullness, by making abstractions and generalizations,
we ascertain certain basic relations upon which occurrence of
the things experienced depends. We treat them as mere events,
that is, as changes brought about in a system of relationships,
ignoring their individualizing qualities. But the qualities are
still there, are still experienced, although as such they are not
the objects of knowledge. But we return from abstractive
thought to experience of them with added meaning and with
increased power to regulate our relations to them.
Reflective knowledge is the only means of regulation. Its
value as instrumental is unique. Consequently philosophers,
themselves occupied in a fascinating branch of reflective know-
ledge, have isolated knowledge and its results. They have
ignored its context of origin and function and made it co-
extensive with all valid experience. The doctrine was thus
formed that all experience of worth is inherently cognitive;
that other modes of experienced objects are to be tested, not
here and there as occasion demands but universally by reduc-
tion to the terms of known objects. This assumption of the
proper ubiquity of knowledge is the great intellectualistic fallacy.
It is the source of all disparagement of everyday qualitative
o
210 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
experience, practical, aesthetic, moral. It is the ultimate source
of the doctrine that calls subjective and phenomenal all objects
of experience that cannot be reduced to properties of objects
of knowledge.
From this derogation of the things we experience by way
of love, desire, hope, fear, purpose and the traits charac-
teristic of human individuality, we are saved by the realization
of the purposefully instrumental and abstract character of
objects of reflective knowledge. One mode of experience is as
real as any other. But apart from the exercise of intelligence
which yields knowledge, the realities of our emotional and
practical life have fragmentary and inconsistent meanings and
are at the mercy of forces beyond our control. We have no
choice save to accept them or to flee from them. Experience of
that phase of objects which is constituted by their relations,
their interactions, with one another, makes possible a new way
of dealing with them, and thus eventually creates a new kind
of experienced objects, not more real than those which
preceded but more significant, and less overwhelming and
oppressive.
Thus the recognition that intelligence is a method opera-
ting within the world places physical knowledge in respect to
other kinds of knowing. It deals with those relations which
are of the broadest scope. It affords a sure foundation for
other more specialized forms of knowing: not in the sense
that these must be reduced to the objects in which physical
knowledge terminates, but in the sense that the latter supply
intellectual points of departure, and suggest operations to be
employed. There is no kind of inquiry which has a monopoly
of the honourable title of knowledge. The engineer, the artist,
the historian, the man of affairs attain knowledge in the degree
they employ methods that enable them to solve the problems
which develop in the subject-matter they are concerned with.
As philosophy framed upon the pattern of experimental inquiry
does away with all wholesale scepticism, so it eliminates all
THE NATURALIZATION OF INTELLIGENCE 211
invidious monopolies of the idea of science. By their fruits we
shall know them.
The marking off of certain conclusions as alone truly science,
whether mathematical or physical, is an historical incident.
It sprang originally from man's desire for a certainty and
peace which he could not attain practically in the absence of
the arts of management and direction of natural conditions.
When modern physical inquiry began, it had a hard time to
get a hearing, or even to be permitted to carry on. The temp-
tation was practically irresistible to treat it as an exclusive and
esoteric undertaking. Moreover, as it progressed, it required
more and more specialized technical preparation. The motive
of defence from social attack and the motive of glorification
of a specialized calling conspired together. All the eulogistic
connotations that gather about "truth" were called into play.
Thus "science", meaning physical knowledge, became a kind
of sanctuary. A religious atmosphere, not to say an idolatrous
one, was created. "Science" was set apart; its findings were
supposed to have a privileged relation to the real. In fact,
the painter may know colours as well as the physicist ; the poet
may know stars, rain and clouds as well as the meteorologist ;
the statesman, educator and dramatist may know human nature
as truly as the professional psychologist ; the farmer may know
soils and plants as truly as the botanist and mineralogist.
For the criterion of knowledge lies in the method used to
secure consequences and not in metaphysical conceptions of
the nature of the real. Nevertheless in the end thinkers in all
lines are dependent upon the mathematician and the physical
inquirer for perfecting of the tools employed in their respective
callings.
That "knowledge" has many meanings follows from the
operational definition of conceptions. There are as many con-
ceptions of knowledge as there are distinctive operations by
which problematic situations are resolved. When it is asserted
that reflective knowledge as such is instrumental, it is not
3i2 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
meant that there is an a priori form of non-reflective know-
ledge, one which is immediately given. What is signified is
that there is a direct possession and enjoyment of meanings to be
had in that experience of objects which issues from reflective
knowledge. It is futile to argue whether the conclusions of
reflective method as such or the eventual objects enriched in
meaning which are capable of direct perception and use more
truly deserve the title of knowledge. It is congenial to our
idiom to call the reflective conclusions of competent methods
by the name of science. But science thus conceived is not a final
thing. The final thing is appreciation and use of things of
direct experience. These are known in as far as their constituents
and their form are the result of science. But they are also
more than science. They are natural objects experienced in
relations and continuities that are summed up in rich and
definite individual forms.
CHAPTER IX
THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD
UNCERTAINTY is PRIMARILY A practical matter. It signifies
uncertainty of the issue of present experiences; these are
fraught with future peril as well as inherently objectionable.
Action to get rid of the objectionable has no warrant of success
and is itself perilous. The intrinsic troublesome and uncertain
quality of situations lies in the fact that they hold outcomes in
suspense; they move to evil or to good fortune. The natural
tendency of man is to do something at once ; there is impatience
with suspense, and lust for immediate action. When action
lacks means for control of external conditions, it takes the form
of acts which are the prototypes of rite and cult. Intelligence
signifies that direct action has become indirect. It continues to
be overt, but it is directed into channels of examination of con-
ditions, and doings that are tentative and preparatory. Instead
of rushing to "do something about it", action centres upon find-
ing out something about obstacles and resources and upon pro-
jecting inchoate later modes of definite response. Thinking has
been well called deferred action. But not all action is deferred;
only that which is final and in so far productive of irretrievable
consequences. Deferred action is present exploratory action.
The first and most obvious effect of this change in the quality
of action is that the dubious or problematic situation becomes
a problem. The risky character that pervades a situation as a
whole is translated into an object of inquiry that locates what
the trouble is, and hence facilitates projection of methods and
means of dealing with it. Only after expertness has been gained
in special fields of inquiry does the mind set out at once from
problems: even then, in novel cases, there is a preliminary
period of groping through a situation which is characterized
throughout by confusion, instead of presenting a clear-cut
problem for investigation.
THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
Many definitions of mind and thinking have been given.
I know of but one that goes to the heart of the matter:
response to the doubtful as such. No inanimate thing reacts to
things as problematic. Its behaviour to other things is capable
of description in terms of what is determinately there. Under
given conditions, it just reacts or does not react. Its reactions
merely enstate a new set of conditions, in which reactions con-
tinue without regard to the nature of their outcome. It makes
no difference, so to say, to a stone what are the results of its
interactions with other things. It enjoys the advantage that it
makes no difference how it reacts, even if the effect is its own
pulverization. It requires no argument to show that the case
is different with a living organism. To live signifies that a
connected continuity of acts is effected in which preceding ones
prepare the conditions under which later ones occur. There is
a chain of cause and effects, of course, in what happens with
inanimate things. But for living creatures, the chain has a
particular cumulative continuity, or else death ensues.
As organisms become more complex in structure and thus
related to a more complex environment, the importance of a
particular act in establishing conditions favourable to subse-
quent acts that sustain the continuity of the life process be-
comes at once more difficult and more imperative. A juncture
may be so critical that the right or wrong present move signifies
life or death. Conditions of the environment become more
ambivalent : it is more uncertain what sort of action they call
for in the interests of living. Behaviour is thus compelled to
become more hesitant and wary, more expectant and prepara-
tory. In the degree that responses take place to the doubtful
as the doubtful, they acquire mental quality. If they are such
as to have a directed tendency to change the precarious and
problematic into the secure and resolved, they are intellectual
as well as mental. Acts are then relatively more instrumental
and less consummatory or final; even the latter are haunted
by a sense of what may issue from them.
THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD 215
This conception of the mental brings to unity various modes
of response; emotional, volitional and intellectual. It is usual
to say that there is no fundamental difference among these
activities that they are all different phases or aspects of a
common action of mind. But I know of but one way of making
this assertion good : that in which they are seen to be distinctive
modes of response to the uncertain. The emotional aspect of
responsive behaviour is its immediate quality. When we are con-
fronted with the precarious, an ebb and flow of emotion marks
a disturbance of the even tenor of existence. Emotions are
conditioned by the indeterminateness of present situations
with respect to their issue. Fear and hope, joy and sorrow,
aversion and desire, as perturbations, are qualities of a divided
response. They involve concern, solicitude, for what the present
situation may become. "Care" signifies two quite different
things : fret, worry and anxiety, and cherishing attention to that
in whose potentialities we are interested. These two meanings
represent different poles of reactive behaviour to a present
having a future which is ambiguous. Elation and depression,
moreover, manifest themselves only under conditions wherein
not everything from start to finish is completely determined
and certain. They may occur at a final moment of triumph
or defeat, but this moment is one of victory or frustration in
connection with a previous course of affairs whose issue was in
suspense. Love for a Being so perfect and complete that our
regard for it can make no difference to it is not so much affec-
tion as (a fact which the scholastics saw) it is concern for the
destiny of our own souls. Hate that is sheer antagonism
without any element of uncertainty is not an emotion, but is
an energy devoted to ruthless destruction. Aversion is a state
of affectivity only in connection with an obstruction offered
by the disliked object or person to an end made uncertain
by it.
The volitional phase of mental life is notoriously connected
with the emotional. The only difference is that the latter is
216 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
the immediate, the cross-sectional, aspect of response to the
uncertain and precarious, while the volitional phase is the
tendency of the reaction to modify indeterminate, ambiguous
conditions in the direction of a preferred and favoured outcome ;
to actualize one of its possibilities rather than another. Emotion
is a hindrance or an aid to resolute will according as it is over-
whelming in its immediacy or as it marks a gathering together
of energy to deal with the situation whose issue is in doubt.
Desire, purpose, planning, choice, have no meaning save in
conditions where something is at stake, and where action in
one direction rather than another may eventuate in bringing
into existence a new situation which fulfils a need.
The intellectual phase of mental action is identical with
an indirect mode of response, one whose purpose is to locate
the nature of the trouble and form an idea of how it may be
dealt with so that operations may be directed in view of an
intended solution. Take any incident of experience you choose,
seeing a colour, reading a book, listening to conversation, mani-
pulating apparatus, studying a lesson, and it has or has not
intellectual, cognitive quality according as there is deliberate
endeavour to deal with the indeterminate so as to dispose of it,
to settle it. Anything that may be called knowledge, or a known
object, marks a question answered, a difficulty disposed of, a
confusion cleared up, an inconsistency reduced to coherence,
a perplexity mastered. Without reference to this mediating
element, what is called knowledge is but direct and unswerving
action or else a possessive enjoyment. Similarly, thinking is
the actual transition from the problematic to the secure, as far
as that is intentionally guided. There is no separate "mind"
gifted in and of itself with a faculty of thought ; such a con-
ception of thought ends in postulating the mystery of a power
outside of nature and yet able to intervene within it. Thinking
is objectively discoverable as that mode of serial responsive
behaviour to a problematic situation in which transition to the
relatively settled and clear is effected.
THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD 217
The concrete pathologies of belief, its failures and perver-
sions, whether of defect or excess, spring from failure to
observe and adhere to the principle that knowledge is the
completed resolution of the inherently indeterminate or
doubtful. The commonest fallacy is to suppose that since the
state of doubt is accompanied by a feeling of uncertainty,
knowledge arises when this feeling gives way to one of assurance.
Thinking then ceases to be an effort to effect change in the
objective situation and is replaced by various devices which
generate a change in feeling or "consciousness". Tendency to
premature judgment, jumping at conclusions, excessive love of
simplicity, making over of evidence to suit desire, taking the
familiar for the clear, etc., all spring from confusing the feeling
of certitude with a certified situation. Thought hastens toward
the settled and is only too likely to force the pace. The natural
man dislikes the dis-ease which accompanies the doubtful and
is ready to take almost any means to end it. Uncertainty is
got rid of by fair means or foul. Long exposure to danger
breeds an overpowering love of security. Love for security,
translated into a desire not to be disturbed and unsettled, leads
to dogmatism, to acceptance of beliefs upon authority, to
intolerance and fanaticism on one side and to irresponsible
dependence and sloth on the other.
Here is where ordinary thinking and thinking that is scrupu-
lous diverge from each other. The natural man is impatient
with doubt and suspense: he impatiently hurries to be shut
of it. A disciplined mind takes delight in the problematic, and
cherishes it until a way out is found that approves itself upon
examination. The questionable becomes an active questioning,
a search; desire for the emotion of certitude gives place to
quest for the objects by which the obscure and unsettled may
be developed into the stable and clear. The scientific attitude
may almost be defined as that which is capable of enjoying
the doubtful; scientific method is, in one aspect, a technique
for making a productive use of doubt by converting it into
THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
operations of definite inquiry. No one gets far intellectually
who does not "love to think", and no one loves to think who
does not have an interest in problems as such. Being on the
alert for problems signifies that mere organic curiosity, the
restless disposition to meddle and reach out, has become a truly
intellectual curiosity, one that protects a person from hurrying
to a conclusion and that induces him to undertake active search
for new facts and ideas. Scepticism that is not such a search
is as much a personal emotional indulgence as is dogmatism.
Attainment of the relatively secure and settled takes place,
however, only with respect to specified problematic situations ;
quest for certainty that is universal, applying to everything, is
a compensatory perversion. One question is disposed of;
another offers itself and thought is kept alive.
When we compare the theory of mind and its organs which
develops from analysis of what takes place when precarious
situations are translated into statement and resolution of
problems, with other theories, the outstanding difference is
that the first type of theory introduces no elements save such
as are public, observable, and verifiable. In general, when
there is discourse about the mental organs and processes of
knowing we are told about sensations, mental images, con-
sciousness and its various states, as if these were capable of
identification in and of themselves. These mental organs having
had meaning assigned to them in isolation from the operations
of resolving a problematic situation, are then used to give an
account of the actual operations of knowing. The more evident
and observable is thus "explained" in terms of the obscure,
the obscurity being hidden from view because of habits that
have the weight of tradition behind them.
We do not need to repeat the results of the previous dis-
cussion. They are all connected with the theory that inquiry
is a set of operations in which problematic situations are
disposed of or settled. Theories which have been criticized
all rest upon a different supposition ; namely, that the proper-
THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD 319
ties of the states and acts of mind involved in knowing are
capable of isolated determination of description apart from
overt acts that resolve indeterminate and ambiguous situations.
The fundamental advantage of framing our account of the
organs and processes of knowing on the pattern of what occurs
in experimental inquiry is that nothing is introduced save what
is objective and is accessible to examination and report. If it is
objected that such an examination itself involves mind and its
organs, the rejoinder is that the theory we have advanced is
self-applying. Its only "assumption" is that something is done,
done in the ordinary external sense of that word, and that
this doing has consequences. We define mind and its organs
in terms of this doing and its results, just as we define or frame
ideas of stars, acids, and digestive tissues in terms of their
behaviour. If it be urged that we do not know whether the
results of the directed operations are really knowledge or not,
the answer is, the objection assumes that we have some kind
of advance intimation of what sort of a thing knowledge must
be, and hence can use this conception as a standard for judging
particular conclusions. The theory in question makes no such
assumption. It asserts that by some operations conclusions
emerge in which objects once uncertain and confused are ren-
dered clear and stable. Alter names as much as you please;
refuse to call one set of consequences knowledge and another
error, or reverse the appellations, and these consequences
remain just what they are. They present the difference between
resolved and clarified situations and disordered and obscure
ones. A rose by another name would smell as sweet; the gist
of the theory advanced is to point to operations performed and
to the consequences which issue from them.
Another point of difference is that traditional theories of
mind and its organs of knowledge isolate them from continuity
with the natural world. They are, in the literal sense of the
word, super-natural or extra-natural. The problem of mind
and body, of how it happens that bodily structures are involved
220 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
in observing and thinking, is then unavoidable. When little
was known about organic structures, one reason for looking
down upon perception was that its connection with bodily
organs, the eye and ear and hand, could not escape notice,
while thought could be regarded as a purely spiritual act. But
now we are aware that the exercise of thought bears the same
relation to the brain that perception bears to sense organs, and
that there is no separation, structural or functional, between
the eye and ear and the central organs. Consequently it is
impossible to think of sense as quasi-physical and thought as
purely mental, as if the mental meant just the non-material.
Yet we retain theories about the mental formed before we had
this knowledge. Consequently, since those theories isolate
knowing from doing, the dependence of knowing upon bodily
organs becomes a mystery a "problem".
But if knowing is one mode of doing, then it, as well as
other modes of doing, properly involves bodily instruments.
The metaphysical problem of the relation of mind and body
is converted into a question, to be solved by observation of
facts, of a differentiation of actions into those on a strictly
physiological level and those which, because of directed
quality and distinctive consequences, are mental.
While traditional theories regard mind as an intruder from
without into the natural development, or evolution, of organic
structures, or else in the interest of natural continuity feel
compelled to deny that mental behaviour has any differential
features, the theory that organic responses have mental quality
in the degree in which they deal with the uncertain recognizes
both continuity and difference. It can, in principle if not as yet
in detail, give a genetic account of the development of mental
and intellectual processes. There is neither a sudden jump from
the merely organic to the intellectual, nor is there complete
assimilation of the latter to primitive modes of the former.
On the objective side, the great difference between the
conceotion orooosed and that of traditional theorv consists in
THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD 221
recognition of the objective character of indeterminateness : it
is a real property of some natural existences. Greek thought
at least acknowledged the presence of contingency in natural
existence, although it used this property of uncertainty to
assign to natural existence a lower status than that which
belongs to necessary Being. Modern thought, largely under
the influence of a Newtonian philosophy of nature, tended to
treat all existence as wholly determinate. The inherently in-
complete was eliminated from nature along with qualities and
ends. In consequence, the mental was sharply marked off from
the physically natural; for the mental was obviously charac-
terized by doubt and uncertainty. Mind was placed outside of
nature; its relation to nature in knowing the latter became a
dark mystery; the uncertain and indeterminate were said to
be merely subjective. The contrast between the doubtful and
the determinate became one of the chief marks by which
objective and subjective were demarcated from each other and
placed in opposition.
According to this doctrine, we are doubtful, puzzled, con-
fused, undecided; objects are complete, assured, fixed. It is
not easy to reconcile this notion with the fact that in order
to relieve our doubt, to "make up" our minds, we have to
modify in some way, in imaginative or overt experimentation,
the situation in which uncertainty is experienced. Moreover,
the procedure of science is conclusive. If doubt and inde-
terminateness were wholly within the mind whatever that
may signify purely mental processes ought to get rid of them.
But experimental procedure signifies that actual alteration of
an external situation is necessary to effect the conversion. A
situation undergoes, through operations directed by thought,
transition from problematic to settled, from internal discon-
tinuity to coherency and organization.
If we define ' 'mental' ' through exclusion of overt acts that
terminate in a changed environment, nothing merely mental
can actually resolve doubt or clarify confusion. At most it can
222 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
produce only a feeling of certainty something best obtained
by withdrawing from the real world and cultivating fantasies.
The idea that doubt and assurance are merely subjective is con-
tradicted by the coincidence of the progress of physical inquiry
with invention and use of physical instruments. In principle,
the correspondence of what we do when a situation is practically
unsatisfactory with what happens in the case of intellectual
doubt is complete. If a man finds himself in a situation which
is practically annoying and troublesome, he has just two courses
open to him. He can make a change in himself either by run-
ning away from trouble or by steeling himself to Stoic endur-
ance ; or he can set to work to do something so as to change the
conditions of which unsatisfactoriness is a quality. When the
latter course is impossible, nothing remains but the former.
Some change of personal attitude is the part of wisdom in
any case, for there are few if any cases of trouble into which
a personal factor of desire or aversion does not enter as a
productive cause. But the idea that this causal factor can be
changed by purely direct means, by an exercise of "will" or
"thought", is illusory. A change of desire and purpose can
itself be effected only indirectly, by a change in one's actual
relation to environment. This change implies definite acts. The
technological appliances and agencies that man has constructed
to make these acts effective correspond to the development
of instruments of scientific inquiry by which outer conditions
are intentionally varied.
The relegation of the problematic to the "subjective*' is
a product of the habit of isolating man and experience from
nature. Curiously enough, modern science has joined with
traditional theology in perpetuating this isolation. If the
physical terms by which natural science deals with the world
are supposed to constitute that world, it follows as a matter of
course that qualities we experience and which are the distinctive
things in human life, fall outside of nature. Since some of these
qualities are the traits that give life purpose and value, it is not
THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD 223
surprising that many thinkers are dissatisfied with thinking of
them as merely subjective; nor that they have found in tradi-
tional religious beliefs and in some elements of the classic
philosophic tradition means by which these traits can be used
to substantiate the being of a reality higher than nature, one
qualified by the purpose and value that are extruded from
natural existence. Modern idealism cannot be understood apart
from the conditions that have generated it. Fundamentally,
these conditions are the fusion of the positive results of the
older metaphysics with the negative conclusions of modern
science: negative, that is to say, when, because of the per-
sistence of earlier notions about mind and the office of know-
ledge, science is taken to disclose an antecedent natural world.
The organism is a part of the natural world ; its interactions
with it are genuine additive phenomena. When, with the
development of symbols, also a natural occurrence, these inter-
actions are directed towards anticipated consequences, they gain
the quality of intelligence, and knowledge accrues. Problematic
situations when they are resolved then gain the meaning of all
the relations which the operations of thought have defined.
Things that were casually effective in producing experienced
results become means to consequences; these consequences
incorporate in themselves all the meanings found in the causes
which intentionally produce them. The supposed grounds for
opposing human experience to the reality of nature disappear.
Situations have problematic and resolved characters in and
through the actual interactions of the organism and the en-
vironment. To refuse to treat these qualities as characteristic
of nature itself is due to an arbitrary refusal to ascribe to some
modes of interaction the existential character which is assigned
as a matter of course to others.
We have seen that situations are precarious and perilous
because the persistence of life-activity depends upon the
influence which present acts have upon future acts. The con-
tinuity of a life-process is secured only as acts performed
224 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
render the environment favourable to subsequent organic acts.
The formal generalized statement of this fact is as follows:
The occurrence of problematic and unsettled situations is due
to the characteristic union of the discrete or individual and the
continuous or relational. All perceived objects are individualized.
They are, as such, wholes complete in themselves. Everything
directly experienced is qualitatively unique; it has its own
focus about which subject-matter is arranged, and this focus
never exactly recurs. While every such situation shades off
indefinitely, or is not sharply marked off from others, yet the
pattern of arrangement of content is never exactly twice
alike.
If the interactions involved in having such an individualized
situation in experience were wholly final or consummatory,
there would be no such thing as a situation which is problem-
atic. In being individual and complete in itself, just what it
is and nothing else, it would be discrete in the sense in which
discreteness signifies complete isolation. Obscurity, for example,
would be a final quality, like any other quality and as good
as any other just as the dusk of twilight is enjoyed instead
of being troublesome until we need to see something the dusk
interferes with seeing. Every situation has vagueness attending
it, as it shades off from a sharper focus into what is indefinite;
for vagueness is added quality and not something objectionable
except as it obstructs gaining an eventual object.
There are situations in which self-enclosed, discrete, indi-
vidualized characters dominate. They constitute the subject*
matter of aesthetic experience ; and every experience is aesthetic
in as far as it is final or arouses no search for some other
experience. When this complete quality is conspicuous the
experience is denominated aesthetic. The fine arts have as their
purpose the construction of objects of just such experiences ;
and under some conditions the completeness of the object
enjoyed gives the experience a quality so intense that it is
justly termed religious. Peace and harmony suffuse the entire
THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD 225
universe gathered up into the situation having a particular
focus and pattern. These qualities mark any experience in as
far as its final character dominates ; in so far a mystic experience
is simply an accentuated intensification of a quality of experience
repeatedly had in the rhythm of experiences.
Interactions, however, are not isolated. No experienced
situation can retain indefinitely its character of finality, for
the interrelations that constitute it are, because they are inter-
actions, themselves changing. They produce a change in what
is experienced. The effort to maintain directly a consum-
matory experienced or to repeat it exactly is the source of
unreal sentimentality and of insincerity. In the continuous
ongoing of life, objects part with something of their final
character and become conditions of subsequent experiences.
There is regulation of the change in the degree in which a
causal character is rendered preparatory and instrumental.
In other words, all experienced objects have a double status.
They are individualized, consummately, whether in the way
of enjoyment or of suffering. They are also involved in a
continuity of interactions and changes, and hence are causes
and potential means of later experiences. Because of this dual
capacity, they become problematic. Immediately and directly
they are just what they are ; but as transitions to and possi-
bilities of later experiences they are uncertain. There is a
divided response; part of the organic activity is directed to
them for what they immediately are, and part to them as
transitive means of other experienced objects. We react to them
both as finalities and in preparatory ways, and the two reactions
do not harmonize.
This twofold character of experienced objects is the source
of their problematic character. Each of us can recall many
occasions when he has been perplexed by disagreement
between things directly present and their potential value as
signs and means; when he has been torn between absorption
in what is now enjoyed and the need of altering it so as to
p
226 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
prepare for something likely to come. If we state the point
in a formal way, it is signified that there is an incompatibility
between the traits of an object in its direct individual and
unique nature and those traits that belong to it in its relations
or continuities. This incompatibility can be removed only by
actions which temporally reconstruct what is given and con-
stitute a new object having both individuality and the internal
coherence of continuity in a series.
Previous discussion has been a statement of the chief factors
that operate in bringing about this reconstruction of resolving
a problematic situation : Acts of analytic reduction of the gross
total situation to determine data qualities that locate the
nature of the problem; formation of ideas or hypotheses to
direct further operations that reveal new material; deductions
and calculations that organize the new and old subject-matter
together; operations that finally determine the existence of a
new integrated situation with added meaning, and in so doing
test or prove the ideas that have been employed.
Without retraversing that discussion, I wish to add a few
words on one point involved in it. Nothing is more familiar
than the standardized objects of reference designated by com-
mon nouns. Their distinction from proper names shows that
they are not singular or individual, not existing things. Yet
"the table" is both more familiar and seemingly more sub-
stantial than this table, the individual. "This" undergoes
change all the time. It is interacting with other things and with
me, who are not exactly the same person as when I last wrote
upon it. "This" is an indefinitely multiple and varied series of
"thises".
But save in extreme cases, these changes are indifferent,
negligible, from the standpoint of means for consequences. The
table is precisely the constancy among the serial "thises" of
whatever serves as an instrument for a single end. Knowledge
is concerned wholly with this constant, this standardized and
averaged set of properties and relations : just as aesthetic per-
THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD 227
ception is occupied with "this" in its individuality, irrespective
of value in use. In the degree in which reactions are inchoate
and unformed, "this" tends to be the buzzing, blooming con-
fusion of which James wrote. As habits form, action is stereo-
typed into a fairly constant series of acts having a common end
in view; the table serves a single use, in spite of individual
variations. A group of properties is set aside, corresponding
to the abiding end and single mode of use which form the
object, in distinction from "this" of unique experiences. The
object is an abstraction, but unless it is hypostatized it is not a
vicious abstraction. It designates selected relations of things
which, with respect to their mode of operation, are constant
within the limits practically important. Moreover, the ab-
stracted object has a consequence in the individualized ex-
periences, one that is immediate and not merely instrumental
to them. It marks an ordering and organizing of responses
in a single focused way in virtue of which the original blur is
definitized and rendered significant. Without habits dealing
with recurrent and constant uses of things for abiding purposes,
immediate aesthetic perception would have neither rich nor
clear meanings immanent within it.
The scientific or physical object marks an extension of the
same sort of operation. The table, as not a table but as a swarm
of molecules in motions of specified velocities and accelera-
tions, corresponds to a liberated generalization of the purposes
which the object may serve. "Table" signifies a definite but
restricted set of uses; stated in the physical terms of science
it is thought of in a wider environment and free from any
specified set of uses; out of relation to any particular indi-
vidualized experience. The abstraction is as legitimate as is
that which gives rise to the idea of the table, for it consists
of standardized relations or interactions. It is even more useful
or more widely instrumental. For it has connection with an
indefinite variety of unspecified but possible consummatory
individual observations and enjoyments. It waits like a servant,
228 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
idle for a time, but ready to be called upon as special occasion
arises. When this standardized constant, the result of series of
operations and expressing an indefinite multitude of possible
relations among concrete things, is treated as the reality of
nature, an instrument made for a purpose is hypostatized into
a substance complete and self-sufficient in isolation. Then the
fullness of qualities present in individual situations have to be
treated as subjective impressions mysteriously produced in
mind by the real object or else as products of a mysterious
creative faculty of consciousness.
The bearing of the conclusion upon the qualitative values
of experienced objects is evident. Interactions of things with
the organism eventuate in objects perceived to be coloured and
sonorous. They also result in qualities that make the object
hateful or delightful. All these qualities, taken as directly
perceived or enjoyed, are terminal effects of natural inter-
actions. They are individualized culminations that give static
quality to a network of changes. Thus "tertiary" qualities (as
they have been happily termed by Mr. Santayana), those which,
in psychological analysis, we call affectional and emotional, are
as much products of the doings of nature as are colour, sound,
pressure, perceived size and distance. But their very consum-
matory quality stands in the way of using the things they
qualify as signs of other things. Intellectually they are even
more in the way than are "secondary" qualities. With respect
to preparatory acts they are useless; when they are treated
as signs and means they work injury to thought and dis-
covery. When not experienced, they are projected in thought
as ends to be reached and in that dependence upon thought
they are felt to be peculiarly mental. But only if the object,
the physical object, instrumental in character, is supposed to
define "the real" in an exhaustive way, do they cease to be
for. the philosopher what they are for the common man:
real qualities of natural objects. This view forms the only
complete and unadulterated realism.
THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD 229
The problem which is supposed to exist between two tables,
one that of direct perception and use and the other that of
physics (to take the favourite illustration of recent discussion)
is thus illusory. The perceived and used table is the only
table, for it alone has both individuality of form without
which nothing can exist or be perceived, and also includes
within itself a continuum of relations or interactions brought
to a focus. We may perhaps employ more instructively an
illustration derived from the supposed contrast between an
object experienced in perception as it is rendered by a poet
and the same object described by a physicist. There is the
instance of a body of water where the movement of the wind
over its surface is reflected in sunlight. As an object of science,
it is reported as follows: "Ethereal vibrations of various wave
lengths, reflected at different angles from the disturbed inter-
face between air and water, reached our eyes and by photo-
electric action caused appropriate stimuli to travel along optic
nerves to a brain centre/' Such a statement, however, includes
ordinary objects of individual perceptions; water, air, brain
and nerves. Consequently, it must be reduced still further;
when so reduced it consists of mathematical functions between
certain physical constants having no counterpart in ordinary
perception. 1
It is worth while at this point to recur to the metric character
of the physical object. Defining metric traits are reached by
a series of operations of which they express the statistically
constant outcome; they are not the result of a single act. Hence
the physical object cannot be taken to be a single or individual
1 The illustration is borrowed from Eddington, The Nature of the
Physical World \ see pp. 316-319. It is indicative of the hold which the
older tradition of knowledge as the exclusive revelation of reality has
obtained, that Eddington finds no way to combine this account with
the poetic account, save to suppose that while the scientific statement
describes reality as it is "in itself", the creative activity of mind adds
to this skeleton the qualities characterizing an object in direct
experience.
230 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
thing in existence. Metric definitions are also, in large measure,
reached by indirect measurements, by calculation. In other
words, the conception of the physical object is, in considerable
degree, the outcome of complex operations of comparison and
translation. In consequence, while the physical object is not any
one of the things compared, it enables things qualitatively
unlike and individual to be treated as if they were members
of a comprehensive, homogeneous or non-qualitative system.
The possibility of control of the occurrence of individualized
objects is thereby increased. At the same time, the latter gain
added meaning, for the import of the scheme of continuity of
relationships with other things is incorporated within them.
The procedure of physics itself, not any metaphysical or epis-
temological theory, discloses that physical objects cannot be
individual existential objects. In consequence, it is absurd to
put them in opposition to the qualitatively individual objects
of concrete experience.
The vogue of the philosophy that identifies the object of
knowledge as such with the reality of the subject-matter of
experience makes it advisable to carry the discussion further.
Physical science submits the things of ordinary experience to
specifiable operations. The results are objects of thought stated
in numbers, where the numbers in question permit inclusion
within complex systems of equations and other mathematical
functions. In the physical object everything is ignored but the
relations expressed by these numbers. It is safe to assert that
no physicist while at work ever thought of denying the full
reality of the things of ordinary, coarse experience. He pays
no attention to their qualities except as they are signs of opera-
tions to be performed and of inferences to relations to be
drawn. But in these capacities he has to admit their full reality
on pain of having, logically, to deny reality to the conclusions
of his operative inferences. He takes the instruments he em-
ploys, including his own sensory-motor organs and measuring
instruments, to be real in the ordinary sense of the word. If
THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD 231
he denied the reality of these things as they are had in ordinary
non-cognitive perceptual experience, the conclusions reached by
them would be equally discredited. Moreover, the numbers
which define his metric object are themselves results of noting
interactions or connections among perceived things. It would
be the height of absurdity to assert the reality of these rela-
tions while denying the reality of the things between which
they hold. If the latter are "subjective" what becomes of the
former? Finally, observation is resorted to for verification. It
is a strange world in which the conception of the real has to
be corroborated by reference to that the reality of which is
made dubious by the conception. To common sense these com-
ments may seem wholly superfluous. But since common sense
may also hold the doctrine from which flow the conclusions to
which the critical comments are apposite, common sense should
first ask whether it holds that knowledge is a disclosure of the
antecedently real. If it entertains this belief, then the dismissal
by science of the experienced object to a limbo of unreality,
or subjectivity or the phenomenal whatever terms be used
results logically from his own position.
Our discussion involves a summary as well as some repeti-
tion of points previously made. Its significance lies in the
liberation which comes when knowing, in all its phases, condi-
tions and organs is understood after the pattern provided by
experimental inquiry, instead of upon the groundwork of ideas
framed before such knowing had a systematic career opened
to it. For according to the pattern set by the practice of know-
ing, knowledge is the fruit of the undertakings that transform
a problematic situation into a resolved one. Its procedure is
public, a part and partner of the Nature in all which inter-
actions exist. But experienced situations come about in two
ways and are of two distinct types. Some take place with only
a minimum of regulation, with little foresight, preparation and
intent. Others occur because, in part, of the prior occurrence
of intelligent action. Both kinds are had\ they are undergone,
2 3 * THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
enjoyed or suffered. The first are not known; they are not
understood; they are dispensations of fortune or providence.
The second have, as they are experienced, meanings that
present the funded outcome of operations that substitute
definite continuity for experienced discontinuity and for the
fragmentary quality due to isolation. Dream, insanity and
fantasy are natural products, as "rear* as anything else in the
world. The acts of intentional regulation which constitute
thinking are also natural developments, and so are the ex-
perienced things in which they eventuate. But the latter are
resolutions of the problems set by objects experienced without
intent and purpose ; hence they have a security and fullness of
meaning the first lack. Nothing happens, as Aristotle and the
scholastics said, without an end without a terminal effectua-
tion. Every experienced object is, in some sense, such a closing
and consummatory closing episode: alike the doubtful and
secure, the trivial and significant, the true and mistaken, the
confused and ordered. Only when the ends are closing
termini of intelligent operations of thinking are they ends
in the honorific sense. We always experience individual
objects, but only the individual things which are fruits of
intelligent action have in them intrinsic order and fullness of
qualities.
The conditions and processes of nature generate uncertainty
and its risks as truly as nature affords security and means of
insurance against perils. Nature is characterized by a constant
mixture of the precarious and the stable. This mixture gives
poignancy to existence. If existence were either completely
necessary or completely contingent, there would be neither
comedy nor tragedy in life, nor need of the will to live. The
significance of morals and politics, of the arts both technical
and fine, of religion and of science itself as inquiry and dis-
covery, all have their source and meaning in the union in
Nature of the settled and the unsettled, the stable and the
hazardous. Apart from this union, there are no such things as
THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD 233
"ends", either as consummations or as those ends-in-view we
call purposes. There is only a block universe, either something
ended and admitting of no change, or else a predestined march
of events. There is no such thing as fulfilment where there is
no risk of failure, and no defeat where there is no promise of
possible achievement.
Any philosophy that in its quest for certainty ignores the
reality of the uncertain in the ongoing processes of nature
denies the conditions out of which it arises. The attempt to
include all that is doubtful within the fixed grasp of that
which is theoretically certain is committed to insincerity and
evasion, and in consequence will have the stigmata of internal
contradiction. Every such philosophy is marked at some point
by a division of its subject-matter into the truly real and the
merely apparent, a subject and an object, a physical and a
mental, an ideal and an actual, that have nothing to do with
one another, save in some mode which is so mysterious as to
create an insoluble problem.
Action is the means by which a problematic situation is
resolved. Such is the net outcome of the method of science.
There is nothing extraordinary about this conclusion. Inter-
action is a universal trait of natural existence. "Action" is the
name given to one mode of this interaction, namely, that
named from the standpoint of an organism. When interaction
has for its consequence the settling of future conditions under
which a life-process goes on, it is an "act". If it be admitted
that knowing is something which occurs within nature, then it
follows as a truism that knowing is an existential overt act.
Only if the one who engages in knowing be outside of nature
and behold it from some external locus can it be denied that
knowing is an act which modifies what previously existed, and
that its worth consists in the consequences of the modifica-
tion. The spectator theory of knowing may, humanly speaking,
have been inevitable when thought was viewed as an exercise
of a "reason" independent of the body, which by means of
234 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
purely logical operations attained truth. It is an anachronism
now that we have the model of experimental procedure before
us and are aware of the role of organic acts in all mental
processes.
Our discussion has for the most part turned upon an analysis
of knowledge. The theme, however, is the relation of know-
ledge and action; the final import of the conclusions as to
knowledge resides in the changed idea it enforces as to action.
The distinction once made between theory and practice has
meaning as a distinction between two kinds of action: blind
and intelligent. Intelligence is a quality of some acts, those
which are directed; and directed action is an achievement, not
an original endowment. The history of human progress is the
story of the transformation of acts which, like the interactions
of inanimate things, take place unknowingly to actions qualified
by understanding of what they are about ; from actions con-
trolled by external conditions to actions having guidance
through their intent: their insight into their own conse-
quences. Instruction, information, knowledge, is the only way
in which this property of intelligence comes to qualify acts
originally blind.
This conclusion is decisive for the significance of purpose
and mechanism in nature. The doctrine that knowledge is
ideally or in its office a disclosure of antecedent reality re-
sulted, under the impact of the results of natural science, in
relegating purpose to the purely subjective, to states of con-
sciousness. An unsolved problem then developed out of the
question as to how purposes could be efficacious in the world.
Now intelligent action is purposive action; if it is a natural
occurrence, coming into being under complex but specifiable
conditions of organic and social interaction, then purpose like
intelligence is within nature; it is a "category" having objective
standing and validity. It has this status in a direct way through
the place and operation of human art within the natural scene ;
for distinctively human conduct can be interpreted and under-
THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD 235
stood only in terms of purpose. Purpose is the dominant
category of anything truly denominated history, whether in its
enacting or in the writing of it, since action which is distinctively
human is marked by intent.
Indirectly, purpose is a legitimate and necessary idea in
describing Nature itself in the large. For man is continuous
with nature. As far as natural events culminate in the intelli-
gent arts of mankind, nature itself has a history, a movement
toward consequences. When for convenience of study nature
is broken up into disconnected bits the parts of which are taken
to have a relation to one another in isolation from other parts,
the concept of purpose has no application. It is excluded by
the very method of intellectual approach. Science is full of
abstractions of this sort. For example, water is a combination
of hydrogen and oxygen in definite proportions. This is a
statement about "water" in general, not about the occurrence
of any particular portion which takes place under conditions
in which more than hydrogen and oxygen exist. Any indi-
vidualized water is a phase of an indefinitely varied and
extensive course of things. Generically, however, "water" is
treated in relation to its defining constituents as if it were a
complete universe in itself. As a statement of a relation that is
stable amid a multitude of varying changes, each having its
own individualized history, it is an instrument of control.
When it is treated as if it provided a model for framing a
general theory of nature, the result converts an instrument of
control into a view of the world in which there is neither
history nor purpose.
Generalized facts, when they are taken to be individual
events complete in themselves, lead to a picture of the uni-
verse in which occurrences are exactly like one another. There
is repetition but no development; mechanical production but
no cumulative movement toward an integrated consequence.
We take out of our logical package what we have put into it,
and then convert what we draw out to be a literal descrip-
236 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
tion of the actual world. Things lose their individuality and
are "instances" of a general law. When, however, events are
viewed in their connections, as it is surely the province of
philosophy to view them, nature is seen to be marked by
histories, some of which terminate in the existence of human
beings and finally in their intelligent activities. This issue,
as the consequence of a cumulative integration of complex
interactions, is such as to give anterior processes a purposive
meaning. Everything depends whether we take short-sections
of the course of nature in isolation, or whether we take the
course of events over a span of time sufficiently long to disclose
the integration of a multitude of processes toward a single
outcome. 1
A machine is a striking instance of mechanism. It is an
equally striking instance of something to be understood in
terms of purpose, use or function. Nature has mechanism. This
mechanism forms the content of the objects of physical science,
for it fulfils the instrumental office to be performed by know-
ledge. If the interactions and connections involved in natural
occurrences were not sufficiently like one another, sufficiently
constant and uniform, so that inference and prediction from
one to another were possible, control and purpose would be
non-existent. Since constant relations among changes are the
subject-matter of scientific thought, that subject-matter is the
mechanism of events. The net effect of modern inquiry makes
it clear that these constancies, whether the larger ones termed
laws or the lesser ones termed facts, are statistical in nature.
They are the products of averaging large numbers of observed
frequencies by means of a series of operations. They are not
descriptions of the exact structure and behaviour of any
individual thing, any more than the actuarial "law" of the
frequency of deaths of persons having a certain age is an
1 Purposive Universe, New York, 1926, by Edmund Noble, contains
by far the best statement known to me of considerations of which a
brief summary is given in this paragraph.
THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD 237
account of the life of one of the persons included in the calcula-
tion. Nature has a mechanism sufficiently constant to permit
of calculation, inference and foresight. But only a philosophy
which hypostatizes isolated results and results obtained for
a purpose, only a substantiation of the function of being
a tool, concludes that nature is a mechanism and only a
mechanism.
It has long been recognized that some physical laws are
statistical, instead of being reports of behaviour of individuals
as such. Heisenberg's principle, together with the discovery
that mass varies with velocity, mark the generalized conclu-
sion that all physical laws are of this character. They are, as
we have noted, predictions of the probability of an observable
event. They mark the culmination of a qualified prediction of
Maxwell's so remarkable as to be worth quoting in full. "The
theory of atoms and void leads us to attach more importance
to the doctrines of integral numbers and definite proportions;
but, in applying dynamic principles to the motion of immense
numbers of atoms, the limitation of our faculties forces us to
abandon the attempt to express the exact history of each atom
and to be content with estimating the average condition of a
group of atoms large enough to be visible. This method of
dealing with groups of atoms, which I might call the statistical
method, and which in the present state of our knowledge is
the only available method of studying the properties of real
bodies, involves an abandonment of strict dynamical principles,
and an adoption of the mathematical methods belonging to the
theory of probability. It is probable that important results
will be obtained by the application of this method, which is,
as yet, little known and is not familiar to our minds. If the
actual history of science had been different, and if the scientific
doctrines most familiar to us had been those which must be
expressed in this way, it is probable that we might have con-
sidered the existence of a certain kind of contingency as a
self-evident truth and treated the doctrine of philosophical
238 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
necessity as a mere sophism." 1 That which Maxwell felt that
he must look upon as a trait due to the "limitation of our
faculties" turns out to be a trait of natural events themselves.
No mechanically exact science of an individual is possible. An
individual is a history unique in character. But constituents
of an individual are known when they are regarded not as
qualitative, but as statistical constants derived from a series of
operations.
This fact has an obvious bearing on freedom in action.
Contingency is a necessary although not, in mathematical
phrase, a sufficient condition of freedom. In a world which was
completely tight and exact in all its constituents, there would
be no room for freedom. Contingency while it gives room for
freedom does not fill that room. Freedom is an actuality when
the recognition of relations, the stable element, is combined
with the uncertain element, in the knowledge which makes
foresight possible and secures intentional preparation for
probable consequences. We are free in the degree in which we
act knowing what we are about. The identification of freedom
with "freedom of will" locates contingency in the wrong
place. Contingency of will would mean that uncertainty was
uncertainly dealt with; it would be a resort to chance for a
decision. The business of "will" is to be resolute; that is, to
resolve, under the guidance of thought, the indeterminateness
of uncertain situations. Choice wavers and is brought to a
head arbitrarily only when circumstances compel action and
yet we have no intelligent clue as to how to act.
The doctrine of "free-will" is a desperate attempt to escape
from the consequences of the doctrine of fixed and immutable
objective Being. With dissipation of that dogma, the need for
such a measure of desperation vanishes. Preferential activities
characterize every individual as individual or unique. In them-
selves these are differential in a de facto sense. They become
1 J. C. Maxwell, Scientific Papers, vol. II, p. 253. 1 am indebted to
Dr. Charles Hartshorne for this reference.
THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD 239
true choices under the direction of insight. Knowledge, instead
of revealing a world in which preference is an illusion and
does not count or make a difference, puts in our possession
the instrumentality by means of which preference may be an
intelligent or intentional factor in constructing a future by
wary and prepared action. Knowledge of special conditions
and relations is instrumental to the action, which is in turn
an instrument of production of situations having qualities of
added significance and order. To be capable of such action is
to be free.
Physical inquiry has been taken as typical of the nature of
knowing. The selection is justified because the operations of
physical knowledge are so perfected and its scheme of symbols
so well devised. But it would be misinterpreted if it were taken
to mean that science is the only valid kind of knowledge ; it is
just an intensified form of knowing in which are written large
the essential characters of any knowing. It is in addition the
most powerful tool we possess for developing other modes
of knowledge. But we know with respect to any subject-
matter whatsoever in the degree in which we are able de-
liberately to transform doubtful situations into resolved
ones. Physical knowledge has the advantage of its specialized
character, its whole-hearted devotion to a single purpose. The
attitude involved in it, its method, has not as yet gone far
beyond its own precincts. Beliefs current in morals, politics
and religion are marked by dread of change and by the feeling
that order and regulative authority can be had only through
reference to fixed standards accepted as finalities, because
referring to fixed antecedent realities. Outside of physical
inquiry, we shy from problems ; we dislike uncovering serious
difficulties in their full depth and reach ; we prefer to accept
what is and muddle along. Hence our social and moral
"sciences" consist largely in putting facts as they are into
conceptual systems framed at large. Our logic in social and
humane subjects is still largely that of definition and classifi-
240 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
cation as until the seventeenth century it was in natural science.
For the most part the lesson of experimental inquiry has still
to be learned in the things of chief concern.
We are, socially, in a condition of division and confusion
because our best authenticated knowledge is obtained by
directed practice, while this method is still limited to things
aloof from man or concerning him only in the technologies of
industries. The rest of our practice in matters that come home
to us most closely and deeply is regulated not by intelligent
operations, but by tradition, self-interest and accidental cir-
cumstance. The most significant phase of physical science,
that which concerns its method, is unapplied in social practice,
while its technical results are utilized by those in positions of
privileged advantage to serve their own private or class ends.
Of the many consequences that result, the state of education
is perhaps the most significant. As the means of the general
institution of intelligent action, it holds the key to orderly
social reconstruction. But inculcation of fixed conclusions rather
than development of intelligence as a method of action still
dominates its processes. Devotion to training in technical and
mechanical skills on one hand and to laying in a store of
abstract information on the other is to one who has the power
to read the scene an almost perfect illustration of the signifi-
cance of the historic separation of knowledge and action, theory
and practice. As long as the isolation of knowledge and practice
holds sway, this division of aims and dissipation of energy,
of which the state of education is typical, will persist. The
effective condition of the integration of all divided purposes
and conflicts of belief is the realization that intelligent action
is the sole ultimate resource of mankind in every field what-
soever.
It is not claimed, therefore, that there is no philosophical
problem of the relation of physical science to the things of
ordinary experience. It is asserted that the problem in the form
in which it has chiefly occupied modern philosophy is an
THE SUPREMACY OF METHOD 241
artificial one, due to the continued assumption of premises
formed in an earlier period of history and now having no
relevancy to the state of physical inquiry. Clearing the ground
of this unreal problem, however, only imposes upon philosophy
the consideration of a problem which is urgently practical,
growing out of the conditions of contemporary life. What
revisions and surrenders of current beliefs about authoritative
ends and values are demanded by the method and conclusions
of natural science? What possibilities of controlled transfor-
mation of the content of present belief and practice in human
institutions and associations are indicated by the control of
natural energies which natural science has effected? These
questions are as genuine and imperative as the traditional
problem is artificial and futile.
CHAPTER X
THE CONSTRUCTION OF GOOD
WE SAW at the outset of our discussion that insecurity gener-
ates the quest for certainty. Consequences issue from every
experience, and they are the source of our interest in what is
present. Absence of arts of regulation diverted the search for
security into irrelevant modes of practice, into rite and cult;
thought was devoted to discovery of omens rather than of
signs of what is to occur. Gradually there was differentiation
of two realms, one higher, consisting of the powers which
determine human destiny in all important affairs. With this
religion was concerned. The other consisted of the prosaic
matters in which man relied upon his own skill and his matter-
of-fact insight. Philosophy inherited the idea of this division.
Meanwhile in Greece many of the arts had attained a state
of development which raised them above a merely routine
state ; there were intimations of measure, order and regularity
in materials dealt with which give intimations of underlying
rationality. Because of the growth of mathematics, there arose
also the ideal of a purely rational knowledge, intrinsically
solid and worthy and the means by which the intimations of
rationality within changing phenomena could be compre-
hended within science. For the intellectual class the stay and
consolation, the warrant of certainty, provided by religion was
henceforth found in intellectual demonstration of the reality
of the objects of an ideal realm.
With the expansion of Christianity, ethico-religious traits
came to dominate the purely rational ones. The ultimate
authoritative standards for regulation of the dispositions and
purposes of the human will were fused with those which satis-
fied the demands for necessary and universal truth. The
authority of ultimate Being was, moreover, represented on earth
by the Church; that which in its nature transcended intellect
THE CONSTRUCTION OF GOOD 243
was made known by a revelation of which the Church was the
interpreter and guardian. The system endured for centuries.
While it endured, it provided an integration of belief and
conduct for the western world. Unity of thought and practice
extended down to every detail of the management of life;
efficacy of its operation did not depend upon thought. It was
guaranteed by the most powerful and authoritative of all
social institutions.
Its seemingly solid foundation was, however, undermined
by the conclusions of modern science. They effected, both in
themselves and even more in the new interests and activities
they generated, a breach between what man is concerned with
here and now and the faith concerning ultimate reality which,
in determining his ultimate and eternal destiny, had previously
given regulation to his present life. The problem of restoring
integration and co-operation between man's beliefs about the
world in which he lives and his beliefs about the values and
purposes that should direct his conduct is the deepest problem
of modern life. It is the problem of any philosophy that is not
isolated from that life.
The attention which has been given to the fact that in its
experimental procedure science has surrendered the separation
between knowing and doing has its source in the fact that
there is now provided within a limited, specialized and techni-
cal field the possibility and earnest, as far as theory is con-
cerned, of effecting the needed integration in the wider field
of collective human experience. Philosophy is called upon to
be the theory of the practice, through ideas sufficiently definite
to be operative in experimental endeavour, by which the inte-
gration may be made secure in actual experience. Its central
problem is the relation that exists between the beliefs about
the nature of things due to natural science to beliefs about
values using that word to designate whatever is taken to
have rightful authority in the direction of conduct. A philo-
sophy which should take up this problem is struck first of all
244 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
by the fact that beliefs about values are pretty much in the
position in which beliefs about nature were before the scientific
revolution. There is either a basic distrust of the capacity of
experience to develop its own regulative standards, and an
appeal to what philosophers call eternal values, in order to
ensure regulation of belief and action; or there is acceptance
of enjoyments actually experienced irrespective of the method
or operation by which they are brought into existence. Com-
plete bifurcation between rationalistic method and an empirical
method has its final and most deeply human significance in
the ways in which good and bad are thought of and acted for
and upon.
As far as technical philosophy reflects this situation, there
is division of theories of values into two kinds. On the one
hand, goods and evils, in every region of life, as they are con-
cretely experienced, are regarded as characteristic of an inferior
order of Being intrinsically inferior. Just because they are
things of human experience, their worth must be estimated by
reference to standards and ideals derived from ultimate reality.
Their defects and perversion are attributed to the same fact;
they are to be corrected and controlled through adoption of
methods of conduct derived from loyalty to the requirements
of Supreme Being. This philosophic formulation gets actuality
and force from the fact that it is a rendering of the beliefs
of men in general as far as they have come under the influ-
ence of institutional religion. Just as rational conceptions were
once superimposed upon observed and temporal phenomena,
so eternal values are superimposed upon experienced goods.
In one case as in the other, the alternative is supposed to be
confusion and lawlessness. Philosophers suppose these eternal
values are known by reason ; the mass of persons that they are
divinely revealed.
Nevertheless, with the expansion of secular interests, tem-
poral values have enormously multiplied; they absorb more
and more attention and energy. The sense of transcendent
THE CONSTRUCTION OF GOOD 245
values has become enfeebled ; instead of permeating all things
in life, it is more and more restricted to special times and acts.
The authority of the Church to declare and impose divine will
and purpose has narrowed. Whatever men say and profess,
their tendency in the presence of actual evils is to resort to
natural and empirical means to remedy them. But in formal
belief, the old doctrine of the inherently disturbed and un-
worthy character of the goods and standards of ordinary
experience persists. This divergence between what men do
and what they nominally profess is closely connected with the
confusions and conflicts of modern thought.
It is not meant to assert that no attempts have been made
to replace the older theory regarding the authority of immut-
able and transcendent values by conceptions more congruous
with the practices of daily life. The contrary is the case. The
utilitarian theory, to take one instance, has had great power.
The idealistic school is the only one in contemporary philoso-
phies, with the exception of one form of neo-realism, that
makes much of the notion of a reality which is all one with
ultimate moral and religious values. But this school is also
the one most concerned with the conservation of "spiritual"
life. Equally significant is the fact that empirical theories
retain the notion that thought and judgment are concerned
with values that are experienced independently of them. For
these theories, emotional satisfactions occupy the same place
that sensations hold in traditional empiricism. Values are
constituted by liking and enjoyment; to be enjoyed and to be
a value are two names for one and the same fact. Since science
has extruded values from its objects, these empirical theories
do everything possible to emphasize their purely subjective
character of value. A psychological theory of desire and liking
is supposed to cover the whole ground of the theory of values ;
in it, immediate feeling is the counterpart of immediate
sensation.
I shall not object to this empirical theory as far as it connects
246 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
the theory of values with concrete experiences of desire and
satisfaction. The idea that there is such a connection is the
only way known to me by which the pallid remoteness of
the rationalistic theory, and the only too glaring presence of the
institutional theory of transcendental values can be escaped.
The objection is that the theory in question holds down value
to objects antecedently enjoyed, apart from reference to the
method by which they come into existence ; it takes enjoyments
which are causal because unregulated by intelligent opera-
tions to be values in and of themselves. Operational thinking
needs to be applied to the judgment of values just as it has
now finally been applied in conceptions of physical objects.
Experimental empiricism in the field of ideas of good and bad
is demanded to meet the conditions of the present situation.
The scientific revolution came about when material of
direct and uncontrolled experience was taken as problematic;
as supplying material to be transformed by reflective operations
into known objects. The contrast between experienced and
known objects was found to be a temporal one; namely, one
between empirical subject-matters which were had or "given
prior to the acts of experimental variation and redisposition
and those which succeeded these acts and issued from them.
The notion of an act whether of sense or thought which sup-
plied a valid measure of thought in immediate knowledge was
discredited. Consequences of operations became the important
thing. The suggestion almost imperatively follows that escape
from the defects of transcendental absolutism is not to be
had by setting up as values enjoyments that happen anyhow,
but in defining value by enjoyments which are the conse-
quences of intelligent action. Without the intervention of
thought, enjoyments are not values but problematic goods,
becoming values when they re-issue in a changed form from
intelligent behaviour. The fundamental trouble with the
current empirical theory of values is that it merely formulates
and justifies the socially prevailing habit of regarding enjoy*
THE CONSTRUCTION OF GOOD 247
ments as they are actually experienced as values in and of
themselves. It completely side-steps the question of regulation
of these enjoyments. This issue involves nothing less than the
problem of the directed reconstruction of economic, political
and religious institutions.
There was seemingly a paradox involved in the notion that
if we turned our backs upon the immediately perceived quali-
ties of things, we should be enabled to form valid conceptions
of objects, and that these conceptions could be used to bring
about a more secure and more significant experience of them.
But the method terminated in disclosing the connections or
interactions upon which perceived objects, viewed as events,
depend. Formal analogy suggests that we regard our direct and
original experience of things liked and enjoyed as only possi-
bilities of values to be achieved; that enjoyment becomes a
value when we discover the relations upon which its presence
depends. Such a causal and operational definition gives only a
conception of a value, not a value itself. But the utilization
of the conception in action results in an object having secure
and significant value.
The formal statement may be given concrete content by
pointing to the difference between the enjoyed and the en-
joyable, the desired and the desirable, the satisfying and the
satisfactory. To say that something is enjoyed is to make a
statement about a fact, something already in existence; it is
not to judge the value of that fact. There is no difference
between such a proposition and one which says that something
is sweet or sour, red or black. It is just correct or incorrect
and that is the end of the matter. But to call an object a value
is to assert that it satisfies or fulfils certain conditions. Func-
tion and status in meeting conditions is a different matter from
bare existence. The fact that something is desired only raises
the question of its desirability; it does not settle it. Only a
child in the degree of his immaturity thinks to settle the ques-
tion of desirability by reiterated proclamation: "I want it, I
248 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
want it, I want it." What is objected to in the current empirical
theory of values is not connection of them with desire and
enjoyment, but failure to distinguish between enjoyments of
radically different sorts. There are many common expressions
in which the difference of the two kinds is clearly recog-
nized. Take for example the difference between the ideas of
"satisfying" and "satisfactory". To say that something satisfies
is to report something as an isolated finality. To assert that
it is satisfactory is to define it in its connections and interac-
tions. The fact that it pleases or is immediately congenial poses
a problem to judgment. How shall the satisfaction be rated?
Is it a value or is it not? Is it something to be prized and
cherished, to be enjoyed? Not stern moralists alone but every-
day experience informs us that finding satisfaction in a thing
may be a warning, a summons to be on the lookout for conse-
quences. To declare something satisfactory is to assert that it
meets specifiable conditions. It is, in effect, a judgment that the
thing "will do". It involves a prediction; it contemplates a
future in which the thing will continue to serve; it will do. It
asserts a consequence the thing will actively institute; it will
do. That it is satisfying is the content of a proposition of fact;
that it is satisfactory is a judgment, an estimate, an appraisal.
It denotes an attitude to be taken, that of striving to perpetuate
and to make secure.
It is worth notice that besides the instances given, there are
many other recognitions in ordinary speech of the distinction.
The endings "able", "worthy" and "ful" are cases in point.
Noted and notable, noteworthy; remarked and remarkable;
advised and advisable; wondered at and wonderful; pleasing
and beautiful; loved and lovable; blamed and blameable,
blameworthy; objected to and objectionable; esteemed and
estimable; admired and admirable; shamed and shameful;
honoured and honourable ; approved and approvable ; worthy of
approbation, etc. The multiplication of words adds nothing
to the force of the distinction. But it aids in conveying a sense
THE CONSTRUCTION OF GOOD 249
of the fundamental character of the distinction; of the differ-
ence between mere report of an already existent fact and
judgment as to the importance and need of bringing a fact into
existence; or, if it is already there, of sustaining it in existence.
The latter is a genuine practical judgment, and marks the only
type of judgment that has to do with the direction of action.
Whether or no we reserve the term "value" for the latter
(as seems to me proper) is a minor matter ; that the distinction
be acknowledged as the key to understanding the relation of
values to the direction of conduct is the important thing.
This element of direction by an idea of value applies to
science as well as anywhere else. For in every scientific under-
taking there is passed a constant succession of estimates ; such
as "it is worth treating these facts as data or evidence; it is
advisable to try this experiment; to make that observation;
to entertain such and such a hypothesis; to perform this
calculation", etc.
The word "taste" has perhaps got too completely asso-
ciated with arbitrary liking to express the nature of judgments
of value. But if the word be used in the sense of an appre-
ciation at once cultivated and active, one may say that the
formation of taste is the chief matter wherever values enter in,
whether intellectual, aesthetic or moral. Relatively immediate
judgments, which we call tact or to which we give the name
of intuition, do not precede reflective inquiry, but are the
funded products of much thoughtful experience. Expertness
of taste is at once the result and the reward of constant exer-
cise of thinking. Instead of there being no disputing about
tastes, they are the one thing worth disputing about, if by
"dispute" is signified discussion involving reflective inquiry.
Taste, if we use the word in its best sense, is the outcome of
experience brought cumulatively to bear on the intelligent
appreciation of the real worth of likings and enjoyments. There
is nothing in which a person so completely reveals himself as
in the things which he judges enjoyable and desirable, Such
250 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
judgments are the sole alternative to the domination of belief
by impulse, chance, blind habit and self-interest. The forma-
tion of a cultivated and effectively operative good judgment
or taste with respect to what is aesthetically admirable, intel-
lectually acceptable and morally approvable is the supreme
task set to human beings by the incidents of experience.
Propositions about what is or has been liked are of instru-
mental value in reaching judgments of value, in as far as the
conditions and consequences of the thing liked are thought
about. In themselves they make no claims; they put forth no
demand upon subsequent attitudes and acts; they profess no
authority to direct. If one likes a thing he likes it; that is a
point about which there can be no dispute: although it is
not so easy to state just what is liked as is frequently assumed.
A judgment about what is to be desired and enjoyed is, on the
other hand, a claim on future action; it possesses de jure and
not merely de facto quality. It is a matter of frequent experi-
ence that likings and enjoyments are of all kinds, and that
many are such as reflective judgments condemn. By way of
self-justification and "rationalization", an enjoyment creates a
tendency to assert that the thing enjoyed is a value. This
assertion of validity adds authority to the fact. It is a decision
that the object has a right to exist and hence a claim upon
action to further its existence.
The analogy between the status of the theory of values
and the theory of ideas about natural objects before the rise
of experimental inquiry may be carried further. The sensa-
tionalistic theory of the origin and test of thought evoked, by
way of reaction, the transcendental theory of a priori ideas.
For it failed utterly to account for objective connection, order
and regularity in objects observed. Similarly, any doctrine
that identifies the mere fact of being liked with the value of
the object liked so fails to give direction to conduct when
direction is needed that it automatically calls forth the asser-
tion that there are values eternally in Being that are the
THE CONSTRUCTION OF GOOD 251
standards of all judgments and the obligatory ends of all
action. Without the introduction of operational thinking, we
oscillate between a theory that, in order to save the objectivity
of judgments of values, isolates them from experience and
nature, and a theory that, in order to save their concrete and
human significance, reduces them to mere statements about
our own feelings.
Not even the most devoted adherents of the notion that
enjoyment and value are equivalent facts would venture to
assert that because we have once liked a thing we should go on
liking it; they are compelled to introduce the idea that some
tastes are to be cultivated. Logically, there is no ground for
introducing the idea of cultivation; liking is liking, and one
is as good as another. If enjoyments are value, the judg-
ment of value cannot regulate the form which liking takes;
it cannot regulate its own conditions. Desire and purpose, and
hence action, are left without guidance, although the question
of regulation of their formation is the supreme problem of
practical life. Values (to sum up) may be connected inher-
ently with liking, and yet not with every liking but only with
those that judgment has approved, after examination of the
relation upon which the object liked depends. A casual liking
is one that happens without knowledge of how it occurs nor to
what effect. The difference between it and one which is sought
because of a judgment that it is worth having and is to be
striven for, makes just the difference between enjoyments
which are accidental and enjoyments that have value and hence
a claim upon our attitude and conduct.
In any case, the alternative rationalistic theory does not
afford the guidance for the sake of which eternal and immut-
able norms are appealed to. The scientist finds no help in
determining the probable truth of some proposed theory by
comparing it with a standard of absolute truth and immutable
being. He has to rely upon definite operations undertaken under
definite conditions upon method. We can hardly imagine
252 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
an architect getting aid in the construction of a building
from an ideal at large, though we can understand his framing
an ideal on the basis of knowledge of actual conditions and
needs. Nor does the ideal of perfect beauty in antecedent
Being give direction to a painter in producing a particular work
of art. In morals, absolute perfection does not seem to be
more than a generalized hypostatization of the recognition that
there is a good to be sought, an obligation to be met both
being concrete matters. Nor is the defect in this respect merely
negative. An examination of history would reveal, I am con-
fident, that these general and remote schemes of value actually
obtain a content definite enough and near enough to concrete
situations as to afford guidance in action only by consecrating
some institution or dogma already having social currency.
Concreteness is gained, but it is by protecting from inquiry
some accepted standard which perhaps is outworn and in need
of criticism.
When theories of values do not afford intellectual assistance
in framing ideas and beliefs about values that are adequate to
direct action, the gap must be filled by other means. If intel-
ligent method is lacking, prejudice, the pressure of immediate
circumstance, self-interest, and class-interest, traditional cus-
toms, institutions of accidental historic origin, are not lacking,
and they tend to take the place of intelligence. Thus we are
led to our main proposition: Judgments about values are
judgments about the conditions and the results of experienced
objects; judgments about that which should regulate the forma-
tion of our desires, affections and enjoyments. For whatever
decides their formation will determine the main course of our
conduct, personal and social.
If it sounds strange to hear that we should frame our
judgments as to what has value by considering the connections
in existence of what we like and enjoy, the reply is not far
to seek. As long as we do not engage in this inquiry enjoyments
(values if we choose to apply that term) are casual; they are
THE CONSTRUCTION OF GOOD 253
given by "nature", not constructed by art. Like natural
objects in their qualitative existence, they at most only supply
material for elaboration in rational discourse. A feeling of
good or excellence is as far removed from goodness in fact
as a feeling that objects are intellectually thus and so is
removed from their being actually so. To recognize that the
truth of natural objects can be reached only by the greatest
care in selecting and arranging directed operations, and then
to suppose that values can be truly determined by the mere
fact of liking seems to leave us in an incredible position. All
the serious perplexities of life come back to the genuine
difficulty of forming a judgment as to the values of the situa-
tion; they come back to a conflict of goods. Only dogmatism
can suppose that serious moral conflict is between something
clearly bad and something known to be good, and that un-
certainty lies wholly in the will of the one choosing. Most
conflicts of importance are conflicts between things which are
or have been satisfying, not between good and evil. And to
suppose that we can make a hierarchical table of values at
large once for all, a kind of catalogue in which they are
arranged in an order of ascending or descending worth, is to
indulge in a gloss on our inability to frame intelligent judgments
in the concrete. Or else it is to dignify customary choice and
prejudice by a title of honour.
The alternative to definition, classification and systematiza-
tion of satisfactions just as they happen to occur is judgment
of them by means of the relations under which they occur.
If we know the conditions under which the act of liking, of
desire and enjoyment, takes place, we are in a position to
know what are the consequences of that act. The difference
between the desired and the desirable, admired and the ad-
mirable, becomes effective at just this point. Consider the
difference between the proposition "That thing has been
eaten", and the judgment "That thing is edible". The former
statement involves no knowledge of any relation except the
254 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
one stated; while we are able to judge of the edibility of
anything only when we have a knowledge of its interactions
with other things sufficient to enable us to foresee its probable
effects when it is taken into the organism and produces effects
there.
To assume that anything can be known in isolation from
its connections with other things is to identify knowing with
merely having some object before perception or in feeling,
and is thus to lose the key to the traits that distinguish an
object as known. It is futile, even silly, to suppose that some
quality that is directly present constitutes the whole of the
thing presenting the quality. It does not do so when the quality
is that of being hot or fluid or heavy, and it does not when
the quality is that of giving pleasure, or being enjoyed. Such
qualities are, once more, effects, ends in the sense of closing
termini of processes involving causal connections. They are
something to be investigated, challenges to inquiry and judg-
ment. The more connections and interactions we ascertain,
the more we know the object in question. Thinking is search
for these connections. Heat experienced as a consequence of
directed operations has a meaning quite different from the heat
that is casually experienced without knowledge of how it came
about. The same is true of enjoyments. Enjoyments that issue
from conduct directed by insight into relations have a meaning
and a validity due to the way in which they are experienced.
Such enjoyments are not repented of: they generate no after-
taste of bitterness. Even in the midst of direct enjoyment,
there is a sense of validity, of authorization, which intensifies
the enjoyment. There is solicitude for perpetuation of the
object having value which is radically different from mere
anxiety to perpetuate the feeling of enjoyment.
Such statements as we have been making are, therefore,
far from implying that there are values apart from things
actually enjoyed as good. To find a thing enjoyable is, so to
say, a plus enjoyment. We saw that it was foolish to treat
THE CONSTRUCTION OF GOOD 255
the scientific object as a rival to or substitute for the perceived
object, since the former is intermediate between uncertain
and settled situations and those experienced under conditions
of greater control. In the same way, judgment of the value of
an object to be experienced is instrumental to appreciation
of it when it is realized. But the notion that every object that
happens to satisfy has an equal claim with every other to be
a value is like supposing that every object of perception has
the same cognitive force as every other. There is no knowledge
without perception; but objects perceived are known only
when they are determined as consequences of connective
operations. There is no value except where there is satisfac-
tion, but there have to be certain conditions fulfilled to trans-
form a satisfaction into a value.
The time will come when it will be found passing strange
that we of this age should take such pains to control by every
means at command the formation of ideas of physical things,
even those most remote from human concern, and yet are
content with haphazard beliefs about the qualities of objects
that regulate our deepest interests ; that we are scrupulous as
to methods of forming ideas of natural objects, and either
dogmatic or else driven by immediate conditions in framing
those about values. There is, by implication, if not explicitly,
a prevalent notion that values are already well known and that
all which is lacking is the will to cultivate them in the order
of their worth. In fact, the most profound lack is not the will
to act upon goods already known but the will to know what
they are.
It is not a dream that it is possible to exercise some degree
of regulation of the occurrence of enjoyments which are of
value. Realization of the possibility is exemplified, for example,
in the technologies and arts of industrial life that is, up
to a definite limit. Men desired heat, light, and speed of
transit and of communication beyond what nature provides
of itself. These things have been attained not by lauding the
as6 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
enjoyment of these things and preaching their desirability, but
by study of the conditions of their manifestation. Knowledge
of relations having been obtained, ability to produce followed,
and enjoyment ensued as a matter of course. It is, however, an
old story that enjoyment of these things as goods is no warrant
of their bringing only good in their train. As Plato was given
to pointing out, the physician may know to heal and the
orator to persuade, but the ulterior knowledge of whether
it is better for a man to be healed or to be persuaded to the
orator's opinion remains unsettled. Here there appears the
split between what are traditionally and conventionally called
the values of the baser arts and the higher values of the truly
personal and humane arts.
With respect to the former, there is no assumption that
they can be had and enjoyed without definite operative know-
ledge. With respect to them it is also clear that the degree in
which we value them is measurable by the pains taken to
control the conditions of their occurrence. With respect to the
latter, it is assumed that no one who is honest can be in doubt
what they are; that by revelation, or conscience, or the instruc-
tion of others, or immediate feeling, they are clear beyond
question. And instead of action in their behalf being taken
to be a measure of the extent in which things are values to
us, it is assumed that the difficulty is to persuade men to
act upon what they already know to be good. Knowledge of
conditions and consequences is regarded as wholly indifferent
to judging what is of serious value, though it is useful in a
prudential way in trying to actualize it. In consequence, the
existence of values that are by common consent of a secondary
and technical sort is under a fair degree of control, while
those denominated supreme and imperative are subject to all
the winds of impulse, custom and arbitrary authority.
This distinction between higher and lower types of value
is itself something to be looked into. Why should there be
a sharp division made between some goods as physical and
THE CONSTRUCTION OF GOOD 257
material and others as ideal and "spiritual"? The question
touches the whole dualism of the material and the ideal at its
root. To denominate anything "matter" or "material" is not in
truth to disparage it. It is, if the designation is correctly
applied, a way of indicating that the thing in question is a
condition or means of the existence of something else. And
disparagement of effective means is practically synonymous
with disregard of the things that are termed, in eulogistic
fashion, ideal and spiritual. For the latter terms if they have
any concrete application at all signify something which is a
desirable consummation of conditions, a cherished fulfilment
of means. The sharp separation between material and ideal
good thus deprives the latter of the underpinning of effective
support while it opens the way for treating things which should
be employed as means as ends in themselves. For since men
cannot after all live without some measure of possession of such
matters as health and wealth, the latter things will be viewed as
values and ends in isolation unless they are treated as integral
constituents of the goods that are deemed supreme and final.
The relations that determine the occurrence of what human
beings experience, especially when social connections are
taken into account, are indefinitely wider and more complex
than those that determine the events termed physical; the
latter are the outcome of definite selective operations. This is
the reason why we know something about remote objects like
the stars better than we know significantly characteristic things
about our own bodies and minds. We forget the infinite
number of things we do not know about the stars, or rather that
what we call a star is itself the product of the elimination,
enforced and deliberate, of most of the traits that belong to an
actual existence. The amount of knowledge we possess about
stars would not seem very great or very important if it were
carried over to human beings and exhausted our knowledge
of them. It is inevitable that genuine knowledge of man and
society should lag far behind physical knowledge.
R
25 B THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
But this difference is not a ground for making a sharp
division between the two, nor does it account for the fact that
we make so little use of the experimental method of forming
our ideas and beliefs about the concerns of man in his charac-
teristic social relations. For this separation religions and
philosophies must admit some responsibility. They have
erected a distinction between a narrower scope of relations and
a wider and fuller one into a difference of kind, naming one
kind material, and the other mental and moral. They have
charged themselves gratuitously with the office of diffusing
belief in the necessity of the division, and with instilling con-
tempt for the material as something inferior in kind in its
intrinsic nature and worth. Formal philosophies undergo
evaporation of their technical solid contents ; in a thinner and
more viable form they find their way into the minds of those
who know nothing of their original forms. When these diffuse
and, so to say, airy emanations re-crystallize in the popular
mind they form a hard deposit of opinion that alters slowly
and with great difficulty.
What difference would it actually make in the arts of conduct,
personal and social, if the experimental theory were adopted
not as a mere theory, but as a part of the working equipment
of habitual attitudes on the part of everyone? It would be
impossible, even were time given, to answer the question in
adequate detail, just as men could not foretell in advance the
consequences for knowledge of adopting the experimental
method. It is the nature of the method that it has to be tried.
But there are generic lines of difference which, within the
limits of time at disposal, may be sketched.
Change from forming ideas and judgments of value on
the basis of conformity to antecedent objects, to constructing
enjoyable objects directed by knowledge of consequences, is
a change from looking to the past to looking to the future.
I do not for a moment suppose that the experiences of the
past, personal and social, are of no importance. For without
THE CONSTRUCTION OF GOOD 259
them we should not be able to frame any ideas whatever of
the conditions under which objects are enjoyed nor any
estimate of the consequences of esteeming and liking them.
But past experiences are significant in giving us intellectual
instrumentalities of judging just these points. They are tools,
not finalities. Reflection upon what we have liked and have
enjoyed is a necessity. But it tells us nothing about the
value of these things until enjoyments are themselves re-
flectively controlled, or until, as they are now recalled, we
form the best judgment possible about what led us to like
this sort of thing and what has issued from the fact that we
liked it.
We are not, then, to get away from enjoyments experienced
in the past and from recall of them, but from the notion that
they are the arbiters of things to be further enjoyed. At present
the arbiter is found in the past, although there are many
ways of interpreting what in the past is authoritative. Nomin-
ally, the most influential conception doubtless is that of a
revelation once had or a perfect life once lived. Reliance
upon precedent, upon institutions created in the past, especially
in law, upon rules of morals that have come to us through
unexamined customs, upon uncriticized tradition, are other
forms of dependence. It is not for a moment suggested that
we can get away from customs and established institutions.
A mere break would doubtless result simply in chaos. But
there is no danger of such a break. Mankind is too inertly
conservative both by constitution and by education to give the
idea of this danger actuality. What there is genuine danger of is
that the force of new conditions will produce disruption exter-
nally and mechanically: this is an ever-present danger. The
prospect is increased, not mitigated, by that conservatism
which insists upon the adequacy of old standards to meet new
conditions. What is needed is intelligent examination of the
consequences that are actually effected by inherited institutions
and customs, in order that there may be intelligent considera-
2 6o THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
tion of the ways in which they are to be intentionally modified
in behalf of generation of different consequences.
This is the significant meaning of transfer of experimental
method from the technical field of physical experience to the
wider field of human life. We trust the method in forming
our beliefs about things not directly connected with human
life. In effect, we distrust it in moral, political and economic
affairs. In the fine arts, there are many signs of a change. In
the past, such a change has often been an omen and precursor
of changes in other human attitudes. But, generally speaking,
the idea of actively adopting experimental method in social
affairs, in the matters deemed of most enduring and ultimate
worth, strikes most persons as a surrender of all standards
and regulative authority. But in principle, experimental method
does not signify random and aimless action ; it implies direction
by ideas and knowledge. The question at issue is a practical
one. Are there in existence the ideas and the knowledge that
permit experimental method to be effectively used in social
interests and affairs ?
Where will regulation come from if we surrender familiar
and traditionally prized values as our directive standards?
Very largely from the findings of the natural sciences. For
one of the effects of the separation drawn between knowledge
and action is to deprive scientific knowledge of its proper
service as a guide of conduct except once more in those
technological fields which have been degraded to an inferior
rank. Of course, the complexity of the conditions upon which
objects of human and liberal value depend is a great obstacle,
and it would be too optimistic to say that we have as yet
enough knowledge of the scientific type to enable us to regulate
our judgments of value very extensively. But we have more
knowledge than we try to put to use, and until we try more
systematically we shall not know what are the important gaps
in our sciences judged from the point of view of their moral
and humane use.
THE CONSTRUCTION OF GOOD 261
For moralists usually draw a sharp line between the field
of the natural sciences and the conduct that is regarded as
moral. But a moral that frames its judgments of value on the
basis of consequences must depend in a most intimate manner
upon the conclusions of science. For the knowledge of the
relations between changes which enable us to connect things
as antecedents and consequences is science. The narrow scope
which moralists often give to morals, their isolation of some
conduct as virtuous and vicious from other large ranges of
conduct, those having to do with health and vigour, business,
education, with all the affairs in which desires and affection
are implicated, is perpetuated by this habit of exclusion of the
subject-matter of natural science from a role in formation of
moral standards and ideals. The same attitude operates in the
other direction to keep natural science a technical specialty,
and it works unconsciously to encourage its use exclusively in
regions where it can be turned to personal and class advantage,
as in war and trade.
Another great difference to be made by carrying the experi-
mental habit into all matter of practice is that it cuts the
roots of what is often called subjectivism, but which is better
termed egoism. The subjective attitude is much more wide-
spread than would be inferred from the philosophies which
have that label attached. It is as rampant in realistic philoso-
phies as in any others, sometimes even more so, although
disguised from those who hold these philosophies under the
cover of reverence of and enjoyment of ultimate values. For
the implication of placing the standard of thought and know-
ledge in antecedent existence is that our thought makes no
difference in what is significantly real. It then affects only our
own attitude toward it.
This constant throwing of emphasis back upon a change
made in ourselves instead of one made in the world in which
we live seems to me the essence of what is objectionable in
"subjectivism". Its taint hangs about even Platonic realism
262 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
with its insistent evangelical dwelling upon the change made
within the mind by contemplation of the realm of essence,
and its depreciation of action as transient and all but sordid
a concession to the necessities of organic existence. All the
theories which put conversion "of the eye of the soul" in the
place of a conversion of natural and social objects that modifies
goods actually experienced, are more a retreat and escape from
existence and this retraction into self is, once more, the heart
of subjective egoisms. The typical examp leis perhaps the other-
worldliness found in religions whose chief concern is with
the salvation of the personal soul. But other- worldliness is
found as well in aestheticism and in all seclusion within ivory
towers.
It is not in the least implied that change in personal attitudes,
in the disposition of the "subject", is not of great impor-
tance. Such change, on the contrary, is involved in any attempt
to modify the conditions of the environment. But there is a
radical difference between a change in the self that is culti-
vated and valued as an end, and one that is a means to alteration,
through action, of objective conditions. The Aristotelean-
mediaeval conviction that highest bliss is found in contemplative
possession of ultimate Being presents an ideal attractive to
some types of mind; it sets forth a refined sort of enjoyment.
It is a doctrine congenial to minds that despair of the effort
involved in creation of a better world of daily experience.
It is, apart from theological attachments, a doctrine sure
to recur when social conditions are so troubled as to make
actual endeavour seem hopeless. But the subjectivism so
externally marked in modern thought as compared with
ancient is either a development of the old doctrine under new
conditions or is of merely technical import. The mediaeval
version of the doctrine at least had the active support of a
great social institution by means of which man could be
brought into the state of mind that prepared him for ultimate
enjoyment of eternal Being. It had a certain solidity and depth
THE CONSTRUCTION OF GOOD 263
which is lacking in modern theories that would attain the
result by merely emotional or speculative procedures, or by any
means not demanding a change in objective existence so as to
render objects of value more empirically secure.
The nature in detail of the revolution that would be wrought
by carrying into the region of values the principle now
embodied in scientific practice cannot be told; to attempt it
would violate the fundamental idea that we know only after
we have acted and in consequences of the outcome of action.
But it would surely effect a transfer of attention and energy
from the subjective to the objective. Men would think of
themselves as agents not as ends; ends would be found in
experienced enjoyment of the fruits of a transforming activity.
In as far as the subjectivity of modern thought represents
a discovery of the part played by personal responses, organic
and acquired, in the causal production of the qualities and
values of objects, it marks the possibility of a decisive gain.
It puts us in possession of some of the conditions that control
the occurrence of experienced objects, and thereby it supplies
us with an instrument of regulation. There is something
querulous in the sweeping denial that things as experienced,
as perceived and enjoyed, in any way depend upon inter-
action with human selves. The error of doctrines that have
exploited the part played by personal and subjective reactions
in determining what is perceived and enjoyed lies either in
exaggerating this factor of constitution into the sole condition
as happens in subjective idealism or else in treating it as a
finality instead of, as with all knowledge, an instrument in
direction of further action.
A third significant change that would issue from carrying
over experimental method from physics to man concerns the
import of standards, principles, rules. With the transfer, these,
and all tenets and creeds about good and goods, would be
recognized to be hypotheses. Instead of being rigidly fixed,
they would be treated as intellectual instruments to be tested
364 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
and confirmed and altered through consequences effected
by acting upon them. They would lose all pretence of finality
the ulterior source of dogmatism. It is both astonishing and
depressing that so much of the energy of mankind has gone
into fighting for (with weapons of the flesh as well as of the
spirit) the truth of creeds, religious, moral and political, as
distinct from what has gone into effort to try creeds by put-
ting them to the test of acting upon them. The change would
do away with the intolerance and fanaticism that attend the
notion that beliefs and judgments are capable of inherent truth
and authority; inherent in the sense of being independent of
what they lead to when used as directive principles. The trans-
formation does not imply merely that men are responsible
for acting upon what they profess to believe; that is an old
doctrine. It goes much further. Any belief as such is tentative,
hypothetical ; it is not just to be acted upon, but is to be framed
with reference to its office as a guide to action. Consequently,
it should be the last thing in the world to be picked up casually
and then clung to rigidly. When it is apprehended as a tool
and only a tool, an instrumentality of direction, the same
scrupulous attention will go to its formation as now goes into
the making of instruments of precision in technical fields.
Men, instead of being proud of accepting and asserting beliefs
and "principles" on the ground of loyalty, will be as ashamed
of that procedure as they would now be to confess their
assent to a scientific theory out of reverence for Newton or
Helmholtz or whomever, without regard to evidence.
If one stops to consider the matter, is there not something
strange in the fact that men should consider loyalty to * 'laws' ',
principles, standards, ideals to be an inherent virtue, accounted
unto them for righteousness ? It is as if they were making up
for some secret sense of weakness by rigidity and intensity of
insistent attachment. A moral law, like a law in physics, is
not something to swear by and stick to at all hazards; it is a
formula of the way to respond when specified conditions pre-
THE CONSTRUCTION OF GOOD 265
sent themselves. Its soundness and pertinence are tested by
what happens when it is acted upon. Its claim or authority
rests finally upon the imperativeness of the situation that has to
be dealt with, not upon its own intrinsic nature as any tool
achieves dignity in the measure of needs served by it. The
idea that adherence to standards external to experienced objects
is the only alternative to confusion and lawlessness was once
held in science. But knowledge became steadily progressive
when it was abandoned, and clues and tests found within con-
crete acts and objects were employed. The test of consequences
is more exacting than that afforded by fixed general rules. In
addition, it secures constant development, for when new acts
are tried new results are experienced, while the lauded immu-
tability of eternal ideals and norms is in itself a denial of the
possibility of development and improvement.
The various modifications that would result from adoption
in social and humane subjects of the experimental way of
thinking are perhaps summed up in saying that it would
place method and means upon the level of importance that
has, in the past, been imputed exclusively to ends. Means
have been regarded as menial, and the useful as the servile.
Means have been treated as poor relations to be endured, but
not inherently welcome. The very meaning of the word
"ideals" is significant of the divorce which has obtained
between means and ends. "Ideals" are thought to be remote
and inaccessible of attainment ; they are too high and fine to
be sullied by realization. They serve vaguely to arouse "aspira-
tion", but they do not evoke and direct strivings for embodiment
in actual existence. They hover in an indefinite way over the
actual scene; they are expiring ghosts of a once significant
kingdom of divine reality whose rule penetrated to every detail
of life.
It is impossible to form a just estimate of the paralysis
of effort that has been produced by indifference to means.
Logically, it is truistic that lack of consideration for means
266 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
signifies that so-called ends are not taken seriously. It is as if
one professed devotion to painting pictures conjoined with
contempt for canvas, brush and paints; or love of music on
condition that no instruments, whether the voice or something
external, be used to make sounds. The good workman in the
arts is known by his respect for his tools and by his interest
in perfecting his technique. The glorification in the arts of
ends at the expense of means would be taken to be a sign
of complete insincerity or even insanity. Ends separated from
means are either sentimental indulgences or if they happen to
exist are merely accidental. The ineffectiveness in action of
"ideals" is due precisely to the supposition that means and
ends are not on exactly the same level with respect to the
attention and care they demand.
It is, however, much easier to point out the formal con-
tradiction implied in ideals that are professed without equal
regard for the instruments and techniques of their realization,
than it is to appreciate the concrete ways in which belief in
their separation has found its way into life and borne corrupt
and poisonous fruits. The separation marks the form in which
the traditional divorce of theory and practice has expressed
itself in actual life. It accounts for the relative impotency of
arts concerned with enduring human welfare. Sentimental
attachment and subjective eulogy take the place of action. For
there is no art without tools and instrumental agencies. But
it also explains the fact that in actual behaviour, energies
devoted to matters nominally thought to be inferior, material
and sordid, engross attention and interest. After a polite and
pious deference has been paid to " ideals' J , men feel free to
devote themselves to matters which are more immediate and
pressing.
It is usual to condemn the amount of attention paid by
people in general to material ease, comfort, wealth, and success
gained by competition, on the ground that they give to mere
means the attention that ought to be given to ends, or that
THE CONSTRUCTION OF GOOD 267
they have taken for ends things which in reality are only
means. Criticisms of the place which economic interest and
action occupy in present life are full of complaints that men
allow lower aims to usurp the place that belongs to higher and
ideal values. The final source of the trouble is, however, that
moral and spiritual "leaders" have propagated the notion
that ideal ends may be cultivated in isolation from "material"
means, as if means and material were not synonymous. While
they condemn men for giving to means the thought and
energy that ought to go to ends, the condemnation should
go to them. For they have not taught their followers to think
of material and economic activities as really means. They have
been unwilling to frame their conception of the values that
should be regulative of human conduct on the basis of the
actual conditions and operations by which alone values can be
actualized.
Practical needs are imminent; with the mass of mankind
they are imperative. Moreover, speaking generally, men are
formed to act rather than to theorize. Since the ideal ends
are so remotely and accidentally connected with immediate
and urgent conditions that need attention, after lip-service is
given to them, men naturally devote themselves to the latter.
If a bird in the hand is worth two in a neighbouring bush, an
actuality in hand is worth, for the direction of conduct, many
ideals that are so remote as to be invisible and inaccessible.
Men hoist the banner of the ideal, and then march in the
direction that concrete conditions suggest and reward.
Deliberate insincerity and hypocrisy are rare. But the notion
that action and sentiment are inherently unified in the con-
stitution of human nature has nothing to justify it. Integration
is something to be achieved. Division of attitudes and responses,
compartmentalizing of interests, is easily acquired. It goes
deep just because the acquisition is unconscious, a matter
of habitual adaptation to conditions. Theory separated from
concrete doing and making is empty and futile; practice then
268 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
becomes an immediate seizure of opportunities and enjoy-
ments which conditions afford without the direction which
theory knowledge and ideas has power to supply. The
problem of the relation of theory and practice is not a problem
of theory alone; it is that, but it is also the most practical
problem of life. For it is the question of how intelligence
may inform action, and how action may bear the fruit of
increased insight into meaning : a clear view of the values that
are worth while and of the means by which they are to be made
secure in experienced objects. Construction of ideals in general
and their sentimental glorification are easy ; the responsibilities
both of studious thought and of action are shirked. Persons
having the advantage of positions of leisure and who find
pleasure in abstract theorizing a most delightful indulgence
to those to whom it appeals have a large measure of liability
for a cultivated diffusion of ideals and aims that are sepa-
rated from the conditions which are the means of actualization.
Then other persons who find themselves in positions of social
power and authority readily claim to be the bearers and
defenders of ideal ends in church and state. They then use the
prestige and authority their representative capacity as guardians
of the highest ends confers on them to cover actions taken in
behalf of the harshest and narrowest of material ends.
The present state of industrial life seems to give a fair
index of the existing separation of means and ends. Isolation
of economics from ideal ends, whether of morals or of organ-
ized social life, was proclaimed by Aristotle. Certain things,
he said, are conditions of a worthy life, personal and social,
but are not constituents of it. The economic life of man,
concerned with satisfaction of wants, is of this nature. Men
have wants and they must be satisfied. But they are only pre-
requisites of a good life, not intrinsic elements in it. Most
philosophers have not been so frank nor perhaps so logical. But
upon the whole, economics has been treated as on a lower level
than either morals or politics. Yet the life which men, women
THE CONSTRUCTION OF GOOD 269
and children actually lead, the opportunities open to them,
the values they are capable of enjoying, their education, their
share in all the things of art and science, are mainly deter-
mined by economic conditions. Hence we can hardly expect
a moral system which ignores economic conditions to be other
than remote and empty.
Industrial life is correspondingly brutalized by failure to
equate it as the means by which social and cultural values are
realized. That the economic life, thus exiled from the pale of
higher values, takes revenge by declaring that it is the only
social reality, and by means of the doctrine of materialistic
determination of institutions and conduct in all fields, denies
to deliberate morals and politics any share of causal regulation,
is not surprising.
When economists were told that their subject-matter was
merely material, they naturally thought they could be "scien-
tific" only by excluding all reference to distinctively human
values. Material wants, efforts to satisfy them, even the
scientifically regulated technologies highly developed in indus-
trial activity, are then taken to form a complete and closed
field. If any reference to social ends and values is introduced
it is by way of an external addition, mainly hortatory. That
economic life largely determines the conditions under which
mankind has access to concrete values may be recognized or
it may not be. In either case, the notion that it is the means to
be utilized in order to secure significant values as the common
and shared possession of mankind is alien and inoperative.
To many persons, the idea that the ends professed by morals
are impotent save as they are connected with the working
machinery of economic life seems like deflowering the purity
of moral values and obligations.
The social and moral effects of the separation of theory
and practice have been merely hinted at. They are so manifold
and so pervasive that an adequate consideration of them would
involve nothing less than a survey of the whole field of morals,
270 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
economics and politics. It cannot be justly stated that these
effects are in fact direct consequences of the quest for cer-
tainty by thought and knowledge isolated from action. For,
as we have seen, this quest was itself a reflex product of actual
conditions. But it may be truly asserted that this quest, under-
taken in religion and philosophy, has had results which have
reinforced the conditions which originally brought it about.
Moreover, search for safety and consolation amid the perils
of life by means other than intelligent action, by feeling and
thought alone, began when actual means of control were
lacking, when arts were undeveloped. It had then a relative
historic justification that is now lacking. The primary problem
for thinking which lays claim to be philosophic in its breadth
and depth is to assist in bringing about a reconstruction of all
beliefs rooted in a basic separation of knowledge and action;
to develop a system of operative ideas congruous with present
knowledge and with present facilities of control over natural
events and energies.
We have noted more than once how modern philosophy
has been absorbed in the problem of effecting an adjustment
between the conclusions of natural science and the beliefs and
values that have authority in the direction of life. The genuine
and poignant issue does not reside where philosophers for the
most part have placed it. It does not consist in accommodation
to each other of two realms, one physical and the other ideal
and spiritual, nor in the reconciliation of the "categories" of
theoretical and practical reason. It is found in that isolation of
executive means and ideal interests which has grown up under
the influence of the separation of theory and practice. For this,
by nature, involves the separation of the material and the
spiritual. Its solution, therefore, can be found only in action
wherein the phenomena of material and economic life are
equated with the purposes that command the loyalties of
affection and purpose, and in which ends and ideals are
framed in terms of the possibilities of actually experienced
THE CONSTRUCTION OF GOOD 271
situations. But while the solution cannot be found in "thought"
alone, it can be furthered by thinking which is operative
which frames and defines ideas in terms of what may be done,
and which uses the conclusions of science as instrumentalities.
William James was well within the bounds of moderation
when he said that looking forward instead of backward, look-
ing to what the world and life might become instead of to what
they have been, is an alteration in the "seat of authority".
It was incidentally remarked earlier in our discussion that
the serious defect in the current empirical philosophy of values,
the one which identifies them with things actually enjoyed
irrespective of the conditions upon which they depend, is that
it formulates and in so far consecrates the conditions of our
present social experience. Throughout these chapters, primary
attention has perforce been given to the methods and statements
of philosophic theories. But these statements are technical
and specialized in formulation only. In origin, content and
import they are reflections of some condition or some phase
of concrete human experience. Just as the theory of the
separation of theory and practice has a practical origin and
a momentous practical consequence, so the empirical theory
that values are identical with whatever men actually enjoy, no
matter how or what, formulates an aspect, and an undesirable
one, of the present social situation.
For while our discussion has given more attention to the
other type of philosophical doctrine, that which holds that
regulative and authoritative standards are found in transcendent
eternal values, it has not passed in silence over the fact that
actually the greater part of the activities of the greater number
of human beings is spent in effort to seize upon and hold on to
such enjoyments as the actual scene permits. Their energies and
their enjoyments are controlled in fact, but they are controlled
by external conditions rather than by intelligent judgment and
endeavour. If philosophies have any influence over the thoughts
and acts of men, it is a serious matter that the most widely held
272 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
empirical theory should in effect justify this state of things
by identifying values with the objects of any interest as such.
As long as the only theories of value placed before us for
intellectual assent alternate between sending us to a realm of
eternal and fixed values and sending us to enjoyments such as
actually obtain, the formulation, even as only a theory, of an
experimental empiricism which finds values to be identical with
goods that are the fruit of intelligently directed activ^y has
its measure of practical significance.
CHAPTER XI
THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION
KANT CLAIMED THAT HE had effected a Copernican revolution
in philosophy by treating the world and our knowledge of it
from the standpoint of the knowing subject. To most critics, the
endeavour to make the known world turn on the constitution
of the knowing mind, seems like a return to an ultra-Ptolemaic
system. But Copernicus, as Kant understood him, effected a
straightening out of astronomical phenomena by interpreting
their perceived movements from their relation to the perceiving
subject, instead of treating them as inherent in the things
perceived. The revolution of the sun about the earth as it offers
itself to sense-perception was regarded as due to the conditions
of human observation and not to the movements of the sun
itself. Disregarding the consequences of the changed point of
view, Kant settled upon this one feature as characteristic of the
method of Copernicus. He thought he could generalize this
feature of Copernican method, and thus clear up a multitude of
philosophical difficulties by attributing the facts in question to
the constitution of the human subject in knowing.
That the consequence was Ptolemaic rather than Copernican
is not to be wondered at. In fact, the alleged revolution of Kant
consisted in making explicit what was implicit in the classic
tradition. In words, the latter had asserted that knowledge is
determined by the objective constitution of the universe. But
it did so only after it had first assumed that the universe is
itself constituted after the pattern of reason. Philosophers first
constructed a rational system of nature and then borrowed
from it the features by which to characterize their knowledge
of it. Kant, in effect, called attention to the borrowing; he
insisted that credit for the borrowed material be assigned to
human reason instead of to divine. His "revolution" was a
shift from a theological to a human authorship; beyond that
S
274 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
point, it was an explicit acknowledgment of what philosophers
in the classic line of descent had been doing unconsciously
before him. For the basic assumption of this tradition was the
inherent correspondence subsisting between intellectus and the
structure of Nature the principle so definitely stated by
Spinoza. By the time of Kant difficulties in this rationalistic
premise had become evident. He thought to maintain the under-
lying idea and remedy the perplexities it entailed by placing the
locus of intellect in man as a knowing subject. The irritation
which this performance arouses in some minds is due rather
to this transfer than to any doubt about the valid function of
reason in the constitution of nature.
Kant refers incidentally to the experimental method of
Galileo as an illustration of the way in which thought actually
takes the lead, so that an object is known because of conformity
to a prior conception : because of its conformity to the specifi-
cations of the latter. The reference makes clear by contrast the
genuine reversal contained in the experimental way of knowing.
It is true that experimentation proceeds on the basis of a direc-
tive idea. But the difference between the office of the idea in
determining a known object and the office assigned to it in
Kant's theory is as great as between the Copernican and the
Ptolemaic systems. For an idea in experiment is tentative,
conditional, not fixed and rigorously determinative. It controls
an action to be performed, but the consequences of the operation
determine the worth of the directive idea ; the latter does not
fix the nature of the object.
Moreover, in experiment everything takes place aboveboard,
in the open. Every step is overt and capable of being observed.
There is a specified antecedent state of things; a specified
operation using means, both physical and symbolic, which are
externally exhibited and reported. The entire process by which
the conclusion is reached that such and such a judgment of an
object is valid is overt. It can be repeated step by step by any-
one. Thus every one can judge for himself whether or not
THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION 275
the conclusion reached as to the object justifies assertion of
knowledge, or whether there are gaps and deflections. Moreover,
the whole process goes on where other existential processes go
on, in time. There is a temporal sequence as definitely as in any
art, as in, say, the making of cotton cloth from ginning of raw
material, through carding and spinning, to the operation of the
loom. A public and manifest series of definite operations, all
capable of public notice and report, distinguishes scientific
knowing from the knowing carried on by inner " mental "
processes accessible only to introspection, or inferred by
dialectic from assumed premises.
There is accordingly opposition rather than agreement
between the Kantian determination of objects by thought and
the determination by thought that takes place in experimenta-
tion. There is nothing hypothetical or conditional about Kant's
forms of perception and conception. They work uniformly and
triumphantly ; they need no differential testing by consequences.
The reason Kant postulates them is to secure universality and
necessity instead of the hypothetical and the probable. Nor is
there anything overt, observable and temporal or historical in
the Kantian machinery. Its work is done behind the scenes.
Only the result is observed, and only an elaborate process of
dialectic inference enables Kant to assert the existence of his
apparatus of forms and categories. These are as inaccessible to
observation as were the occult forms and essences whose
rejection was a prerequisite of development of modern science.
These remarks are not directed particularly against Kant.
For, as has been already said, he edited a new version of old
conceptions about mind and its activities in knowing, rather
than evolved a brand-new theory. But since he happens to
be the author of the phrase "Copernican revolution", his
philosophy forms a convenient point of departure for con-
sideration of a genuine reversal of traditional ideas about
the mind, reason, conceptions and mental processes. Phases
of this revolution have concerned us in the previous lectures.
276 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
We have seen how the opposition between knowing and doing,
theory and practice, has been abandoned in the actual enterprise
of scientific inquiry, how knowing goes forward by means of
doing. We have seen how the cognitive quest for absolute
certainty by purely mental means has been surrendered in
behalf of search for a security, having a high degree of proba-
bility, by means of preliminary active regulation of conditions.
We have considered some of the definite steps by which
security has come to attach to regulation of change rather than
absolute certainty to the unchangeable. We have noted how in
consequence of this transformation the standard of judgment
has been transferred from antecedents to consequents, from
inert dependence upon the past to intentional construction of
a future.
If such changes do not constitute, in the depth and scope
of their significance, a reversal comparable to a Copernican
revolution, I am at a loss to know where such a change can be
found or what it would be like. The old centre was mind know-
ing by means of an equipment of powers complete within itself,
and merely exercised upon an antecedent external material
equally complete in itself. The new centre is indefinite inter-
actions taking place within a course of nature which is not fixed
and complete, but which is capable of direction to new and
different results through the mediation of intentional operations.
Neither self nor world, neither soul nor nature (in the sense of
something isolated and finished in its isolation) is the centre,
any more than either earth or sun is the absolute centre of a
single universal and necessary frame of reference. There is a
moving whole of interacting parts ; a centre emerges wherever
there is effort to change them in a particular direction.
The reversal has many phases, and these are interconnected.
It cannot be said that one is more important than another. But
one change stands out with an extraordinary distinctness. Mind
is no longer a spectator beholding the world from without and
finding its highest satisfaction in the joy of self-sufficing
THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION 277
contemplation. The mind is within the world as a part of the
latter's own on-going process. It is marked off as mind by the
fact that wherever it is found, changes take place in a directed
way, so that a movement in a definite oneway sense from the
doubtful and confused to the clear, resolved and settled takes
place. From knowing as an outside beholding to knowing as
an active participant in the drama of an on-moving world is
the historical transition whose record we have been following.
As far as philosophy is concerned, the first direct and imme-
diate effect of this shift from knowing which makes a difference
to the knower but none in the world, to knowing which is
a directed change within the world, is the complete abandon-
ment of what we may term the intellectualist fallacy. By this
is meant something which may also be termed the ubiquity of
knowledge as a measure of reality. Of the older philosophies,
framed before experimental knowing had made any significant
progress, it may be said that they made a definite separation
between the world in which man thinks and knows and the
world in which he lives and acts. In his needs and in the acts
that spring from them, man was a part of the world, a sharer
in its fortunes, sometimes willingly, sometimes perforce; he
was exposed to its vicissitudes and at the mercy of its irregular
and unforeseeable changes. By acting in and upon the world he
made his earthly way, sometimes failing, sometimes achieving,
He was acted upon by it, sometimes carried forward to un-
expected glories and sometimes overwhelmed by its disfavour.
Being unable to cope with the world in which he lived, he
sought some way to come to terms with the universe as a whole.
Religion was, in its origin, an expression of this endeavour.
After a time, a few persons with leisure and endowed by fortune
with immunity from the rougher impacts of the world, dis-
covered the delights of thought and inquiry. They reached the
conclusion that through rational thought they could rise above
the natural world in which, with their body and those mental
processes that were connected with the body, they lived. In
278 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
striving with the inclemencies of nature, suffering its bufferings,
wresting sustenance from its resources, they were parts of
nature. But in knowledge, true knowledge which is rational,
occupied with objects that are universal and immutable, they
escaped from the world of vicissitude and uncertainty. They
were elevated above the realm in which needs are felt and
laborious effort imperative. In rising above this world of sense
and time, they came into rational communion with the divine
which was untroubled and perfect mind. They became true
participants in the realm of ultimate reality. Through knowledge,
they were without the world of chance and change, and within
the world of perfect and unchanging Being.
How far this glorification by philosophers and scientific
investigators of a life of knowing, apart from and above a life
of doing, might have impressed the popular mind without
adventitious aid there is no saying. But external aid came.
Theologians of the Christian Church adopted this view in a
form adapted to their religious purposes. The perfect and
ultimate reality was God; to know Him was eternal bliss. The
world in which man lived and acted was a world of trials and
troubles to test and prepare him for a higher destiny. Through
thousands of ways, including histories and rites, with symbols
that engaged the emotions and imagination, the essentials of
the doctrine of classic philosophy filtered their way into the
popular mind.
It would be a one-sided view which held that this story gives
the entire account of the elevation of knowing and its object
above practical action and its objects. A contributing cause was
found in the harshness, cruelties and tragic frustrations of the
world of action. Were it not for its brutalities and failures, the
motive for seeking refuge in a higher realm of knowledge would
have been lacking. It was easy and, as we say, "natural" to
associate these evils with the fact that the world in which we
act is a realm of change. The generic fact of change was made
absolute and the source of all the troubles and defects of the
THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION 279
world in which we directly live. At the very best, good and
excellence are insecure in a world of change; good can be
securely at home only in a realm of fixed unchanging substance.
When the source of evil was once asserted to reside in the
inherent deficiencies of a realm of change, responsibility was
removed from human ignorance, incapacity and insusceptibility.
It remained only to change our own attitude and disposition,
to turn the soul from perishable things toward perfect Being.
In this idea religion stated in one language precisely what the
great philosophic tradition stated in another.
Nor is this the whole of the story. There was, strangely
enough, a definitely practical ground for the elevation of
knowledge above doing and making. Whenever knowledge is
actually obtained, a measure of security through ability to
control ensues. There is a natural inclination to treat value as
a measure of reality. Since knowledge is the mode of experience
that puts in our hands the key to controlling our other dealings
with experienced objects, it has a central position. There is no
practical point gained in asserting that a thing is what it is
experienced to be apart from knowledge. If a man has typhoid
fever, he has it; he does not have to search for or pry into it.
But to know it, he does have to search : to thought, to intellect,
the fever is what it is known to be. For when it is known, the
various phenomena of having it, the direct experiences, fall
into order ; we have at least that kind of control called under-
standing, and with this comes the possibility of a more active
control. The very fact that other experiences speak, so to say,
for themselves makes it unnecessary to ask what they are. When
the nature of an existence is in doubt and we have to seek for
it, the idea of reality is consciously present. Hence the thought
of existence becomes exclusively associated with knowing.
Other ways of experiencing things exist so obviously that we
do not think of existence in connection with them.
At all events, whatever the explanation, the idea that cognition
is the measure of the reality found in other modes of experience
2 8o THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
is the most widely distributed premise of philosophies. The
equation of the real and the known comes to explicit statement
in idealistic theories. If we remind ourselves of the landscape
with trees and grasses waving in the wind and waves dancing in
sunlight, we recall how scientific thought of these things strips
off the qualities significant in perception and direct enjoyment,
leaving only certain physical constants stated in mathematical
formulae. What is more natural, then, than to call upon mind to
reclothe by some contributory act of thought or consciousness
the grim skeleton offered by science? Then if only it can be
shown that mathematical relations are themselves a logical
construction of thought, the knowing mind is enstated as the
constitutive author of the whole scheme. Realistic theories have
protested against doctrines that make the knowing mind the
source of the thing known. But they have held to a doctrine of
a partial equation of the real and the known ; only they have
read the equation from the side of the object instead of the
subject. Knowledge must be the grasp or vision of the real as
it "is in itself ", while emotions and affections deal with it as it
is affected with an alien element supplied by the feeling and
desiring subject. The postulate of the unique and exclusive
relation among experienced things of knowledge and the real
is shared by epistemological idealist and realist.
The meaning of a Copernican reversal is that we do not
have to go to knowledge to obtain an exclusive hold on reality.
The world as we experience it is a real world. But it is not in its
primary phases a world that is known, a world that is understood,
and is intellectually coherent and secure. Knowing consists of
operations that give experienced objects a form in which the
relations upon which the onward course of events depends
are securely experienced. It marks a transitional redirection
and rearrangement of the real. It is intermediate and instru-
mental; it comes between a relatively casual and accidental
experience of existence and one relatively settled and defined.
The knower is within the world of existence ; his knowing, as
THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION 281
experimental, marks an interaction of one existence with other
existences. There is, however, a most important difference
between it and other existential interactions. The difference is
not between something going on within nature as a part of itself
and something else taking place outside it, but is that between
a regulated course of changes and an uncontrolled one. In
knowledge, causes become means and effects become conse-
quences, and thereby things have meanings. The known object
is an antecedent object as that is intentionally rearranged and
redisposed, an eventual object whose value is tested by the
reconstruction it effects. It emerges, as it were, from the fire
of experimental thought as a refined metal issues from opera-
tions performed on crude material. It is the same object but
the same object with a difference, as a man who has been
through conditions which try the temper of his being comes
out the same man and a different man.
Knowledge then does not encompass the world as a whole.
But the fact that it is not coextensive with experienced existence
is no defect nor failure on its part. It is an expression of the fact
that knowledge attends strictly to its own business : trans-
formation of disturbed and unsettled situations into those more
controlled and more significant. Not all existence asks to be
known, and it certainly does not ask leave from thought to exist.
But some existences as they are experienced do ask thought to
direct them in their course so that they may be ordered and
fair and be such as to commend themselves to admiration,
approval and appreciation. Knowledge affords the sole means
by which this redirection can be effected. As the latter is
brought about, parts of the experienced world have more
luminous and organized meaning and their significance is
rendered more secure against the gnawing tooth of time. The
problem of knowledge is the problem of discovery of methods
for carrying on this enterprise of redirection. It is a problem
never ended, always in process; one problematic situation is
resolved and another takes its place. The constant gain is not
282 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
in approximation to universal solution, but in betterment of
methods and enrichment of objects experienced.
Man as a natural creature acts as masses and molecules act ;
he lives as animals live, eating, fighting, fearing, reproducing.
As he lives, some of his actions yield understanding and things
take on meaning, for they become signs of one another; means
of expectation and of recall, preparations for what is to come
and celebrations of what has gone. Activities take on ideal
quality. Attraction and repulsion become love of the admirable
and hate of the harsh and ugly, and they seek to find and make
a world in which they may be securely at home. Hopes and
fears, desires and aversions, are as truly responses to things as
are knowing and thinking. Our affections, when they are
enlightened by understanding, are organs by which we enter
into the meaning of the natural world as genuinely as by know-
ing, and with greater fullness and intimacy. This deeper and
richer intercourse with things can be effected only by thought
and its resultant knowledge; the arts in which the potential
meanings of nature are realized demand an intermediate and
transitional phase of detachment and abstraction. The colder
and less intimate transactions of knowing involve temporary
disregard of the qualities and values to which our affections
and enjoyments are attached. But knowledge is an indispensable
medium of our hopes and fears, of loves and hates, if desires
and preferences are to be steady, ordered, charged with meaning,
secure.
The glorification of knowledge as the exclusive avenue of
access to what is real is not going to give way soon nor all at once.
But it can hardly endure indefinitely. The more widespread
become the habits of intelligent thought, the fewer enemies
they meet from those vested interests and social institutions
whose power depends upon immunity from inspection by
intelligence, in short, the more matter of course they become,
the less need will there seem to be for giving knowledge an
exclusive and monopolistic position. It will be prized for its
THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION 283
fruits rather than for the properties assigned to it when it was a
new and precarious enterprise. The common fact that we prize
in proportion to rarity has a good deal to do with the exclusive
esteem in which knowledge has been held. There is so much
unintelligent appetite and impulse, so much routine action, so
much that is dictated by the arbitrary power of other persons,
so much, in short, that is not informed and enlightened by
knowledge, that it is not surprising that action and knowledge
should have been isolated in thought from one another, and
knowledge treated as if it alone had dealings with real existence.
I do not know when knowledge will become naturalized in the
life of society. But when it is fully acclimatized, its instrumental,
as distinct from its monopolistic, role in approach to things of
nature and society will be taken for granted without need for
such arguments as I have been engaging in. Meantime, the
development of the experimental method stands as a prophecy
of the possibility of the accomplishment of this Copernican
Revolution.
Whenever anyone speaks about the relation of knowledge
(especially if the word science be used) to our moral, artistic
and religious interests, there are two dangers to which he is
exposed. There exist on one hand efforts to use scientific
knowledge to substantiate moral and religious beliefs, either
with respect to some specific form in which they are current
or in some vague way that is felt to be edifying and comforting.
On the other hand, philosophers derogate the importance and
necessity of knowledge in order to make room for an undisputed
sway of some set of moral and religious tenets. It may be that
preconceptions will lead some to interpret what has been said in
one or other of these senses. If so, it is well to state that not a
word has been said in depreciation of science ; what has been
criticized is a philosophy and habit of mind on the ground of
which science is prized for false reasons. Nor does this negative
statement cover the whole ground. Knowledge is instrumental.
But the purport of our whole discussion has been in praise of
284 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
tools, instrumentalities, means, putting them on a level
equal in value to ends and consequences, since without them
the latter are merely accidental, sporadic and unstable. To
call known objects, in their capacity of being objects of
knowledge, means is to appreciate them, not to depreciate
them.
Affections, desires, purposes, choices are going to endure as
long as man is man; therefore as long as man is man, there are
going to be ideas, judgments, beliefs about values. Nothing could
be sillier than to attempt to justify their existence at large ; they
are going to exist anyway. What is inevitable needs no proof
for its existence. But these expressions of our nature need
direction, and direction is possible only through knowledge.
When they are informed by knowledge, they themselves
constitute, in their directed activity, intelligence in operation.
Thus as far as concerns particular value-beliefs, particular
moral and religious ideas and creeds, the import of what has
been said is that they need to be tested and revised by the best
knowledge at command. The moral of the discussion is anything
but a reservation for them of a position in which they are exempt
from the impact, however disintegrative it may be, of new
knowledge.
The relation between objects as known and objects with
respect to value is that between the actual and the possible. "The
actual" consists of given conditions; "the possible " denotes
ends or consequences not now existing but which the actual
may through its use bring into existence. The possible in
respect to any given actual situation is thus an ideal for that
situation; from the standpoint of operational definition of
thinking in terms of action the ideal and the possible are
equivalent ideas. Idea and ideal have more in common than
certain letters of the alphabet. Everywhere an idea, in its
intellectual content, is a projection of what something existing
may come to be. One may report a quality already sensed in a
proposition, as when standing before the fire I remark upon
THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION 285
how hot it is. When seeing something at a distance, I judge
without sensible contact that it must be hot; "hot" expresses
a consequence which I infer would be experienced if I were
to approach close enough ; it designates a possibility of what is
actually there in experience. The instance is a trivial one, but
it sets forth what happens in every case where any predicate,
whether quality or relation, expresses an idea rather than a
sensibly perceived characteristic. The difference is not between
one mental state called a sensation and another called an image.
It is between what is experienced as being already there and
what marks a possibility of being experienced. If we agree to
leave out the eulogistic savour of "ideal" and define it in
contrast with the actual, the possibility denoted by an idea is
the ideal phase of the existent.
The problem of the connection or lack of connection of the
actual and the ideal has always been the central problem of
philosophy in its metaphysical aspect, just as the relation
between existence and idea has been the central theme of
philosophy on the side of the theory of knowledge. Both issues
come together in the problem of the relation of the actual and
the possible. Both problems are derived from the necessities of
action if that is to be intelligently regulated. Assertion of an idea
or of an ideal, if it is genuine, is a claim that it is possible to
modify what exists so that it will take on a form possessed of
specifiable traits. This statement as it relates to an idea, to the
cognitive aspect, takes us back to what has been said about
ideas as designations of operations and their consequences.
Its bearing upon the "ideal" concerns us at this point.
In this basic problem of the relation of the actual and ideal,
classic philosophies have always attempted to prove that the
ideal is already and eternally a property of the real. The quest
for absolute cognitive certainty has come to a head in the quest
for an ideal which is one with the ultimately real. Men have
not been able to trust either the world or themselves to realize
the values and qualities which are the possibilities of nature.
286 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
The sense of incompetency and the sloth born of desire for
irresponsibility have combined to create an overwhelming
longing for the ideal and rational as an antecedent possession
of actuality, and consequently something upon which we can
fall back for emotional support in times of trouble.
The assumption of the antecedent inherent identity of actual
and ideal has generated problems which have not been solved.
It is the source of the problem of evil ; of evil not merely in the
moral sense, but in that of the existence of defect and aberration,
of uncertainty and error, of all deviation from the perfect. If
the universe is in itself ideal, why is there so much in our
experience of it which is so thoroughly un-ideal ? Attempts to
answer this question have always been compelled to introduce
lapse from perfect Being: some kind of fall to which is due
the distinction between noumena and phenomena, things as
they really are and as they seem to be. There are many versions
of this doctrine. The simplest, though not the one which has
most commended itself to most philosophers, is the idea of the
"fall of man", a fall which, in the words of Cardinal Newman,
has implicated all creation in an aboriginal catastrophe. I am
not concerned to discuss them and their respective weaknesses
and strengths. It is enough to note that the philosophies which
go by the name of Idealism are attempts to prove by one method
or another, cosmological, ontological or epistemological, that
the Real and the Ideal are one, while at the same time they
introduce qualifying additions to explain why after all they are
not one.
There are three ways of idealizing the world. There is
idealization through purely intellectual and logical processes,
in which reasoning alone attempts to prove that the world has
characters that satisfy our highest aspirations. There are, again,
moments of intense emotional appreciation when, through a
happy conjunction of the state of the self and of the surrounding
world, the beauty and harmony of existence is disclosed in
experiences which are the immediate consummation of all for
THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION 287
which we long. Then there is an idealization through actions
that are directed by thought, such as are manifested in the works
of fine art and in all human relations perfected by loving care.
The first path has been taken by many philosophies. The
second while it lasts is the most engaging. It sets the measure
of our ideas of possibilities that are to be realized by intelligent
endeavour. But its objects depend upon fortune and are insecure.
The third method represents the way of deliberate quest for
security of the values that are enjoyed by grace in our happy
moments.
That in fortunate moments objects of complete and approved
enjoyment are had is evidence that nature is capable of giving
birth to objects that stay with us as ideal. Nature thus supplies
potential material for embodiment of ideals. Nature, if I may
use the locution, is idealizable. It lends itself to operations by
which it is perfected. The process is not a passive one. Rather
nature gives, not always freely, but in response to search, means
and material by which the values we judge to have supreme
quality may be embodied in existence. It depends upon the
choice of man whether he employs what nature provides and
for what ends he uses it.
Idealism of this type is not content with dialectical proofs
that the perfect is already and immutably in Being, either as a
property of some higher power or as an essence. The emotional
satisfactions and encouragements thus supplied are not an
adequate substitute for an ideal which is projected in order to be
a guide of our doings. While the happy moment brings us objects
to admire, approve and revere, the security and extent in which
the beautiful, the true and the revered qualify the world, depend
upon the way in which our own affections and desires for that
kind of world engage activities. Things loved, admired and
revered, things that spiritualistic philosophies have seized upon
as the defining characters of ultimate Being, are genuine
elements of nature. But without the aid and support of deliberate
action based on understanding of conditions, they are transitory
288 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
and unstable, as well as narrow and confined in the number of
those who enjoy them.
Religious faiths have come under the influence of philosophies
that have tried to demonstrate the fixed union of the actual and
ideal in ultimate Being. Their interest in persuading to a life
of loyalty to what is esteemed good, has been bound up with
a certain creed regarding historical origins. Religion has also
been involved in the metaphysics of substance, and has thrown
in its lot with acceptance of certain cosmogonies. It has found
itself fighting a battle and a losing one with science, as if religion
were a rival theory about the structure of the natural world.
It has committed itself to assertions about astronomical,
geological, biological subject-matter; about questions of
anthropology, literary criticism and history. With the advances
of sciences in these fields it has in consequence found itself
involved in a series of conflicts, compromises, adjustments
and retreats.
The religious attitude as a sense of the possibilities of
existence and as devotion to the cause of these possibilities,
as distinct from acceptance of what is given at the time,
gradually extricates itself from these unnecessary intellectual
commitments. But religious devotees rarely stop to notice that
what lies at the basis of recurrent conflicts with scientific
findings is not this or that special dogma so much as it is
alliance with philosophical schemes which hold that the reality
and power of whatever is excellent and worthy of supreme
devotion depends upon proof of its antecedent existence, so
that the ideal of perfection loses its claim over us unless it can
be demonstrated to exist in the sense in which the sun and
stars exist.
Were it not because of this underlying assumption, there
could be no conflict between science and religion. The currency
of attempts to reconcile scientific conclusions with special
doctrines of religion may unfortunately suggest, when such a
statement is made, the idea of some infallible recipe for concilia-
THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION 289
tion. But nothing is further from its meaning. It signifies that a
religious attitude would surrender once for all commitment
to beliefs about matters of fact, whether physical, social or
metaphysical. It would leave such matters to inquirers in other
fields. Nor would it substitute in their place fixed beliefs about
values, save the one value of the worth of discovering the
possibilities of the actual and striving to realize them. Whatever
is discovered about actual existence would modify the content
of human beliefs about ends, purposes and goods. But it would
and could not touch the fact that we are capable of directing
our affection and loyalty to the possibilities resident in the
actualities discovered. An idealism of action that is devoted
to creation of a future, instead of to staking itself upon proposi-
tions about the past, is invincible. The claims of the beautiful
to be admired and cherished do not depend upon ability to
demonstrate statements about the past history of art. The
demand of righteousness for reverence does not depend upon
ability to prove the existence of an antecedent Being who is
righteous.
It is not possible to set forth with any accuracy or complete-
ness just what form religion would take if it were wedded to
an idealism of this sort, or just what would happen if it broke
away from that quest for certitude in the face of peril and
human weakness which has determined its historic and institu-
tional career. But some features of the spirit of the change
which would follow may be indicated. Not the least important
change would be a shift from the defensive and apologetic
position which is practically compulsory as long as religious
faith is bound up with defence of doctrines regarding history
and physical nature ; for this entanglement subjects it to con-
stant danger of conflict with science. The energy which is thus
diverted into defence of positions that have in time to be
surrendered would be released for positive activity in behalf of
the security of the underlying possibilities of actual life. More
important still would be liberation from attachment to dogmas
T
290 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
framed in conditions very unlike those in which we live, and
the substitution of a disposition to turn to constructive account
the results of knowledge.
It is not possible to estimate the amelioration that would
result if the stimulus and support given to practical action by
science were no longer limited to industry and commerce and
merely "secular" affairs. As long as the practical import of the
advance of science is confined to these activities, the dualism
between the values which religion professes and the urgent
concerns of daily livelihood will persist. The gulf between them
will continually grow wider, and the widening will not, judging
from past history, be at the expense of the territory occupied
by mundane and secular affairs. On the contrary, ideal interests
will be compelled to retreat more and more to a confined ground.
The philosophy which holds that the realm of essence subsists
as an independent realm of Being also emphasizes that this is a
realm of possibilities ; it offers this realm as the true object of
religious devotion. But, by definition, such possibilities are
abstract and remote. They have no concern nor traffic with
natural and social objects that are concretely experienced. It
is not possible to avoid the impression that the idea of such a
realm is simply the hypostatizing in a wholesale way of the fact
that actual existence has its own possibilities. But in any case
devotion to such remote and unattached possibilities simply
perpetuates the other-worldliness of religious tradition,
although its other-world is not one supposed to exist. Thought
of it is a refuge, not a resource. It becomes effective in relation
to the conduct of life only when separation of essence from
existence is cancelled ; when essences are taken to be possibilities
to be embodied through action in concrete objects of secure
experience. Nothing is gained by reaching the latter through
a circuitous course.
Religious faith which attaches itself to the possibilities of
nature and associated living would, with its devotion to the ideal,
manifest piety toward the actual. It would not be querulous
THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION 291
with respect to the defects and hardships of the latter. Respect
and esteem would be given to that which is the means of
realization of possibilities, and to that in which the ideal
is embodied if it ever finds embodiment. Aspiration and
endeavour are not ends in themselves ; value is not in them in
isolation but in them as means to that reorganization of the
existent in which approved meanings are attained. Nature and
society include within themselves projection of ideal possibilities
and contain the operations by which they are actualized.
Nature may not be worshipped as divine even in the sense of
the intellectual love of Spinoza. But nature, including humanity,
with all its defects and imperfections, may evoke heartfelt
piety as the source of ideals, of possibilities, of aspiration in
their behalf, and as the eventual abode of all attained goods and
excellencies.
I have no intention of entering into the field of the psychology
of religion, that is to say, the personal attitudes involved in
religious experience. But I suppose that no one can deny that
the sense of dependence, insisted upon, for example, by
Schleiermacher, comes close to the heart of the matter. This
sense has taken many different forms in connection with different
states of culture. It has shown itself in abject fears, in
practice of extreme cruelties designed to propitiate the
powers upon which we depend, and in militantly fanatical
intolerance on the part of those who felt that they had special
access to the ultimate source of power and a peculiar authori-
zation to act in its behalf. It has shown itself in noble
humilities and unquenchable ardours. History shows that
there is no channel in which the sense of dependence is pre-
destined to express itself.
But of the religious attitude which is allied to acceptance of
the ideally good as the to-be-realized possibilities of existence,
one statement may be made with confidence. At the best, all
our endeavours look to the future and never attain certainty.
The lesson* of probability holds for all forms of activity as truly
THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
as for the experimental operations of science, and even more
poignantly and tragically. The control and regulation of which
so much has been said never signifies certainty of outcome,
although the greater meed of security it may afford will not be
known until we try the experimental policy in all walks of life.
The unknown surrounds us in other forms of practical activity
even more than in knowing, for they reach further into the
future, in more significant and less controllable ways. A sense
of dependence is quickened by that Copernican revolution
which looks to security amid change instead of to certainty
in attachment to the fixed.
It would, moreover, alter its dominant quality. One of the
deepest of moral traditions is that which identifies the source
of moral evil, as distinct from retrievable error, with pride,
and which identifies pride with isolation. This attitude of
pride assumes many forms. It is found among those who
profess the most complete dependence, often pre-eminently
among them. The pride of the zealously devout is the most
dangerous form of pride. There is a divisive pride of the learned,
as well as of family wealth and power. The pride of those
who feel themselves learned in the express and explicit will of
God is the most exclusive. Those who have this pride, one that
generates an exclusive institutionalism and then feeds and
sustains itself through its connection with an institution claim-
ing spiritual monopoly, feel themselves to be special organs of
the divine, and in its name claim authority over others.
The historic isolation of the church from other social institu-
tions is the result of this pride. The isolation, like all denials of
interaction and interdependence, confines to special channels
the power of those who profess special connection with the ideal
and spiritual. In condemning other modes of human association
to an inferior position and role, it breeds irresponsibility in the
latter. This result is perhaps the most serious of the many
products of that dualism between nature and spirit in which
isolation of the actual and the possible eventuates. The sense of
THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION 293
dependence that is bred by recognition that the intent and effort
of man are never final but are subject to the uncertainties of an
indeterminate future, would render dependence universal and
shared by all. It would terminate the most corroding form of
spiritual pride and isolation, that which divides man from man
at the foundation of life's activities. A sense of common partici-
pation in the inevitable uncertainties of existence would be
coeval with a sense of common eifort and shared destiny. Men
will never love their enemies until they cease to have enmities.
The antagonism between the actual and the ideal, the spiritual
and the natural, is the source of the deepest and most injurious
of all enmities.
What has been said might seem to ignore the strength of
those traditions in which are enshrined the emotions and
imaginations of so many human beings, as well as the force of
the established institutions by which these traditions are
carried. I am, however, engaged only in pointing out the possi-
bility of a change. This task does not require us to ignore the
practical difficulties in the way of realizing it. There is one
aspect of these difficulties which is pertinent at this point. It
is appropriate to inquire as to the bearing of them upon the
future office of philosophy. A philosophy committed to rational
demonstration of the fixed and antecedent certainty of the ideal,
with a sharp demarcation of knowledge and higher activity
from all forms of practical activity, is a philosophy which
perpetuates the obstacles in the way of realization of the
possibility that has been pointed out. It is easy both to minimize
the practical effect of philosophic theories and to exaggerate it.
Directly, it is not very great. But as an intellectual formulation
and justification of habits and attitudes already obtaining among
men its influence is immense. The vis inertiae of habit is tremen-
dous, and when it is reinforced by a philosophy which also is
embodied in institutions, it is so great as to be a factor in sus-
taining the present confusion and conflict of authorities and
allegiances.
294 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
A final word about philosophy is then in place. Like religion
it has come into conflict with the natural sciences, or at least its
path has diverged increasingly from theirs since the seventeenth
century. The chief cause of the split is that philosophy has
assumed for its function a knowledge of reality. This fact makes
it a rival instead of a complement to the sciences. It has forced
philosophy into claiming a kind of knowledge which is more
ultimate than theirs. In consequence it has, at least in its more
systematic forms, felt obliged to revise the conclusions of science
to prove that they do not mean what they say ; or that, in any
case, they apply to a world of appearances instead of to the
superior reality to which philosophy directs itself. Idealistic
philosophies have attempted to prove from an examination of
the conditions of knowledge that mind is the only reality. What
does it matter, they have said in effect, if physical knowledge
recognizes only matter, since matter itself is mental ? Idealisms
in proving that the ideal is once for all the real has absolved
itself from the office, more useful if humbler, of attempting
that interpretation of the actual by means of which values could
be made more extensive and more secure.
General ideas, hypotheses, are necessary in science itself.
They serve an indispensable purpose. They open new points
of view; they liberate us from the bondage of habit which is
always closing in on us, restricting our vision both of what is
and of what the actual may become. They direct operations
that reveal new truths and new possibilities. They enable us
to escape from the pressure of immediate circumstance and
provincial boundaries. Knowledge falters when imagination
clips its wings or fears to use them. Every great advance in
science has issued from a new audacity of imagination. What
are now working conceptions, employed as a matter of course
because they have withstood the tests of experiment and have
emerged triumphant, were once speculative hypotheses.
There is no limit set to the scope and depth of hypotheses.
There are those of short and technical range and there are
THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION 295
those as wide as experience. Philosophy has always claimed
universality for itself. It will make its claim good when it con-
nects this universality with the formation of directive hypotheses
instead of with a sweeping pretension to knowledge of universal
Being. That hypotheses are fruitful when they are suggested
by actual need, are bulwarked by knowledge already attained
and are tested by the consequences of the operations they
evoke goes without saying. Otherwise imagination is dissipated
into fantasies and rises vaporously into the clouds.
The need for large and generous ideas in the direction of
life was never more urgent than in the confusion of tongues,
beliefs and purposes that characterizes present life. Knowledge
of actual structure and processes of existence has reached a
point where a philosophy which has the will to use knowledge
has guidance and support. A philosophy which abandoned its
guardianship of fixed realities, values and ideals, would find a
new career for itself. The meaning of science in terms of science,
in terms of knowledge of the actual, may well be left to science
itself. Its meaning in terms of the great human uses to which it
may be put, its meaning in the service of possibilities of secure
value, offers a field for exploration which cries out from very
emptiness. To abandon the search for absolute and immutable
reality and value may seem like a sacrifice. But this renunciation
is the condition of entering upon a vocation of greater vitality.
The search for values to be secured and shared by all, because
buttressed in the foundations of social life, is a quest in which
philosophy would have no rivals, but coadjutors in men of
good will.
Philosophy under such conditions finds itself in no opposition
to science. It is a liaison officer between the conclusions of
science and the modes of social and personal action through
which attainable possibilities are projected and striven for. No
more than a religion devoted to inspiration and cultivation of
the sense of ideal possibilities in the actual would it find itself
checked by any possible discovery of science. Each new
296 THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
discovery would afford a new opportunity. Such a philosophy
would have a wide field of criticism before it. But its critical
mind would be directed against the domination exercised by
prejudice, narrow interest, routine custom and the authority
which issues from institutions apart from the human ends they
serve. This negative office would be but the obverse of the
creative work of the imagination in pointing to the new possi-
bilities which knowledge of the actual discloses and in projecting
methods for their realization in the homely everyday experience
of mankind.
Philosophy has often entertained the ideal of a complete
integration of knowledge. But knowledge by its nature is
analytic and discriminating. It attains large syntheses, sweeping
generalizations. But these open up new problems for considera-
tion, new fields for inquiry; they are transitions to more detailed
and varied knowledge. Diversification of discoveries and the
opening up of new points of view and new methods are inherent
in the progress of knowledge. This fact defeats the idea of any
complete synthesis of knowledge upon an intellectual basis.
The sheer increase of specialized knowledge will never work
the miracle of producing an intellectual whole. Nevertheless,
the need for integration of specialized results of science remains,
and philosophy should contribute to the satisfaction of the need.
The need, however, is practical and human rather than
intrinsic to science itself; the latter is content as long as it can
move to new problems and discoveries. The need for direction
of action in large social fields is the source of a genuine demand
for unification of scientific conclusions. They are organized
when their bearing on the conduct of life is disclosed. It is at
this point that the extraordinary and multifarious results of
scientific inquiry are unorganized, scattered, chaotic. The
astronomer, biologist, chemist, may attain systematic wholes,
at least for a time, within his own field. But when we come to
the bearing of special conclusions upon the conduct of social
life, we are, outside of technical fields, at a loss. The force of
THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION 297
tradition and dogmatic authority is due, more than to anything
else, to precisely this defect. Man has never had such a varied
body of knowledge in his possession before, and probably never
before has he been so uncertain and so perplexed as to what
his knowledge means, what it points to in action and in
consequences.
Were there any consensus as to the significance of what is
known upon beliefs about things of ideal and general value, our
life would be marked by integrity instead of by distraction and
by conflict of competing aims and standards. Needs of practical
action in large and liberal social fields would give unification
to our special knowledge ; and the latter would give solidity
and confidence to the judgment of values that control conduct.
Attainment of this consensus would mean that modern life had
reached maturity in discovering the meaning of its own in
intellectual movement. It would find within its own interests
and activities the authoritative guidance for its own affairs
which it now vainly seeks in oscillation between outworn
traditions and reliance upon casual impulse.
The situation defines the vital office of present philosophy.
It has to search out and disclose the obstructions; to criticize
the habits of mind which stand in the way ; to focus reflection
upon needs congruous to present life; to interpret the conclu-
sions of science with respect to their consequences for our
beliefs about purposes and values in all phases of life. The
development of a system of thought capable of giving this
service is a difficult undertaking; it can proceed only slowly
and through co-operative effort. In these pages I have tried to
indicate in outline the nature of the task to be accomplished
and to suggest some of the resources at hand for its realization.
INDEX
Absolute and Absolutism, 10, 106,
137, 154*-, 251
Abstraction, io8., 148, 153, 158,
207-9, 227, 235
Action and Knowledge, 7, 8, 9, 32,
35, 72, 84, 86, 144, 161, 186, 196,
204, 205, 213, 222, 233, 276; see
Knowledge, Operations, Theory
Activity, pure, 213, 91
Actual, 62, 284-6
Aesthetic, 88, 92, 98, 147, 150, 177,
227
Agnosticism, 185
Analysis, 90, 119, 167
Antecedents and Consequences, 25,
45, 68, 72, 85, 100, 122, 124, 132,
140, 143, 158, 164, 177, 183, 188,
211, 219, 246, 253, 259
Appearances, 23, 26, 32, 35, 101,
105, 107
Application of science, 78-9, 84
Appreciation, 211, 250, 256, 284
A priori, see Reason
Aristotle, 17-19, 41, 74, 90, 174/2.,
232, 262, 268
Arts, 7, 8, 32, 46, 47, 83, 98, 133,
143, 198, 242, 256; liberal and
mechanical, 74; social, 41; and
science, 74
Authority, 92; conflict in, Ch. Ill;
seat of, Ch. VIII, 243, 249, 256,
271 ; see Control, Standards
Axioms, 136
Barry, F., 95 n., 147, 154^.
Beliefs, 7, 18, 28, 81
Bergson, H., 89
Berkeley, Bishop, 118, 137
Body, 8 1 ; and Mind, 219
Bridgman, P. W., 107/1., 195
Causality, 154
Certainty, 4, 31, 51, 60, 124, 196,
242 ; see Control, Security
Change, 20, 81, 82, 98, 102, 124,
127, 198, 201, 225, 239, 277; see
Immutables
Church, the, 74, 242, 262, 268, 278,
292
Cohen, M. R., io8fl.
Communication, 144
Compossibility, 153
Conception of concepticrs, 1427?.;
empirical, 159; and laws, 198;
see Ideas, Operations, Thought
Concrete, meaning of, 148
Consciousness, 84, 217
Consequences, see Antecedents, Ends
Contingency, 22, 193-6, 219, 232,
23843, 291 ; see Luck, Probability
Continuity, 214, 220, 224, 229; see
Operations, Relations
Control, 96, 98, 102, 103, 124, 165,
203, 230, 235, 246, 281; by arts,
7> 32; by rites, 7, 14, 213, 242;
by intelligence, Ch. IV ; two kinds,
82, 127; ground of, 128
Crisis, 44, 214
Crisis in Culture, 41, 44, 48, 70, 76,
240
Data, 96, 118, 129, 132, 165-6, 170
Deduction, see Implication
Definition, 50, 96, 121, 136, 146, 174
Demonstration, 105, 109; see Proof,
Test
Dependence, 291
Descartes, 43, 57, 61, 90, 136, 151
Discovery, 1757
Discreteness, 111,121,137,168, 173,
221-3,232
Dualism, 16, 33, 52, 58, 75, 233,
257-8, 292
Economics, 79, 202, 266-9
Eddington, A. S., 108, 125-6, 229
Education, 240
Einstein, A., 122, 139-41
Emotion, 215
Empiricism, 76, 104, 138
Ends, 20, 23, 42, 50-1, 56-7, 91,
97, 99, 145, H^, H9t 22 5, 232;
and means, 38-9, 47
Enjoyment, see Values
Epistemology, 84, 117, 230
Escape, from Peril, Ch. I; sec
Control
Essences, 35, 65, 88, 116, 135, 144,
157, 170, 262, 290; properties of,
i 54-60
Euclid, 19, 87, 135, 151, 174
Events, 81, 101, 122, 125, 140, 230
Evils, 36, 64, 99, 286, 292
Evolution, 64
300
THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
Experience, and Experienced Ob-
jects, 75, 96, 103-4, 132, 161,
187-92, 207-9, 230-2, 263, 281;
as empirical and experimental,
79-82
Experimental Method, 9, 27, 38,
80, 84-104 and Ch. V, 161, 164,
178, 192, 204, 231, 258, 250, 260,
275
Explanation, 174, 218
Faith, 58
Familiarity, 177, 200
Fichte, 62
First Philosophy, 17-18
Freedom, 238
Galileo, 92-5, 274
Generalization, 121, 129
Good, 1 8, 36, 54-6, Ch. X; see
Ends, Values
Greek Science, see Aristotle, New-
tonian Philosophy
Habit , inertia of intellectual , 82 , 1 3 1 ,
168, 199,227
Hartshorne, C., 238/1.
Hegel, 62-3
Heine, 59
Heisenberg, 192-5, 237
Heterogeneity and Homogeneity,
92, 95, 102, 118, 128, 230
History, 234
Holy, the, 15
Hume, D., 137, 150
Hypostatization, 148, 158, 208,228,
237, 252, 290; see Substance
Hypothesis, 76, 104, 158-60, 165,
168, 172, 176, 178, 264, 274
Idealism, 25, 35, 61-3, 105, 125,
133, 136, 160, 170, 180, 223, 245,
264, 279, 287, 294
Ideals, 62, 105, 157, 257, 265, 282,
284-8
Idealization, three modes of, 287
Ideas, 60, 84, 160, 165, 169, 284;
and operations, Ch. V; free, and
mathematics, Ch. VI; see Reflec-
tive Thought
Identification, 180-4
Immediacy, 105, 106, 123, 175,
178-9,211, 215, 249
Immutables, Ch. II; 21, 23, 25, 51,
89, 137, 155, 156, 200, 203, 238,
295 ; see Change
Incompatibility, 154
Indemonstrables , see Axioms, Imme-
diacy
Indeterminancy, 192-5; see Con-
tingency
Individual, 10, 130, 141, 156, 163,
176, 195, 196-9, 208, 215, 225-6,
229, 235
Industry and Industrialism, 78, 207,
268, 289
Inference, see Reflective Thinking
Instrumental and Instrumentalism,
38/1., 103, 130, 142, 196, 199,209,
225-7,239,280,283
Intellectualism, 24, 57, 209; see
Ubiquity, Vision
Intelligence and Nature, Ch. VIII.
Intelligibility of nature, 55, 199,
205, 206
Interaction, 26, 38, 77, 103-4, 144,
165, 170, 197, 204, 223-5, 228,
233 , 276 ; see Operations, Relations
Intuition, 136, 176, 178
Irrationality of nature, 201
James, Wm., 200, 227, 271
Judgment, 133; defined, 203, 248,
253
Kant and Kantianism, 43, 59, 164,
273-6
Knowledge and Action, Ch. I, 37,
48, 81,103, 133, 164-8, 195; theory
of, 42, 47, 83, 173, 219; types of,
188-90, 211 ; unification of, 290
Laissez-faire, 203
Laplace, 193
Laws, 30, 57, 193, 196-7, 236
Life, 214
Light, 123, 177, 194
Locke, J., 28, 116, 176
Logic, 19, 63, 65, 135, 148, 150,
154, 179, 189
Logical Forms, 66, 88-7, 141, 189;
see Essences
Logos, 88, 90
Luck, ii, 15, 99
Machine, nature of, 156, 236
Magic, 41
Mass, 93, 123, 138
Materialism, 76, 105, 270
Mathematics, 19, 30, 57, 65, 86, 90,
95, 105, 123, 128, 195, 229, 242;
in physics, 136-40; pure, 14551 ;
see Symbols
Matter, 93,257
INDEX
301
Maxwell, C., 237
Mead,G. H., 9 6.
Means, 46, 149, 155, 223, 226, 257;
see Antecedents, Consequences, Ends
Measurement, 86, 121, 147
Mechanism, 200, 234
Method, 7, 29, 37, 192, 206, 208,
217, 240; supremacy of, Ch. IX;
see Experimental Method
Metric Objects, 125, 201, 229-31
Michelson-Morley Experiment, 123,
139
Mill, J. S., 109, 150, 174*.
Morals, 9, 33, 40, 60, 98, 233, 239,
250, 259; see Values
Motion, 93, 121, 128
Movement, qualitative, 90
Nature, 54, 56, 201, Ch. VIII, 232,
287; as God, 56
Newman, Cardinal, 53 , 286
Newtonian Philosophy, 60, 93-4
107, 111-13, 136-8, 178, 183,
192-3, 195, 203, 221
Noble, E., 236/1.
Non-being, 21, 22, 37; see Changes
Novelty, 176-7
Number, 124, 147, 149
Objects, Perceived; see Experience,
Perception, Qualities
Objects, Physical, 97 , 102
Observation, 81, 82, 84, 137, UO,
165, 197-8
Operations, 82, 193, Ch. V, passim,
132, 166, 192, 207, 246; origin
of, 119
Opinion, 23, 8 1, 92
Participation, 195, 203, 233, 277,
293
Pathology of beliefs, 217
Peirce, C. S., 38^., 140
Perception, 80,86-8, 117, 137, 168,
220, 229, 254; see Observation,
Sense
Peril, Ch. I, passim, 7-9, 10, 35, 213
Peripatetic Philosophy, see Aristotle
Phenomena, 59, 142, 231, 286;
nature of, 102
Phenomenalism, 184
Philosophy, 8, 17, 18, 21, 27, 31,
65-70 ; modern problem of, Ch. II,
especially, 42, 45, 50, 67, 71, 100,
127, 270; true problem of, 47,
67, 160-1, 240-1, 243-4, 294-8
Physical science, 23, 64, 77, 78, 178,
181, 227-9; Chs. V, VI, passim,
207-1 i
Plato, 135, 151, 174, 256, 261
Possibility, 149-54, *57, 216, 247,
284-8, 295; see Symbols
Practice, depreciated, 8, 17, 25, 31,
38 ; meaning of, 32
Pragmatism, 38/1.
Primitive Life, 13, 14, 34, 39, 99,
242,270
Probability, 10, 28, 194, 254, 276,
291
Problem, importance of, 97-101,
118, 129, 169, 172, 197, 209,
213-26, 231, 235
Proof, 175, 177
Purpose, 99, 234
Qualities and Qualitative Objects,
Chs. II and III, passim, 87, 165,
220, 222, 226; in modern science,
54 > *53; primary and secondary
117; tertiary, 228 ; static, 121 ; see
Aesthetic^ Data
Quantity, 90
Rationalism, 29, 82, 118, 138, 149,
158, 164, 172,201, 244,251
Realism, 65, 168, 170, 176, 228,
245, 261, 280, 290; see Essences
Reason, 20, 51, 59, 75, 86, 88, 106
163,203,273-4,277
Recognition, 177
Reflective Thinking, 106, 136, 170,
*73-6, 209, 211, 250
Relations, 82, 90, 101, 102, 116, 121,
126, 129, 140, 148, 152, 156, 161,
166, 168, 176, 198, 210, 233, 238,
253
Relativity, theory of , 122, 140
Religion, 14-18, 32, 52-3, 69, 154,
211,242,277,283,288-93
Revolution, Copernican, Ch. XI.
Revolution, Scientific, 30, 51, 83,
85-6, 90,243,246
Santayana, G., 228
Satisfaction, 246-8
Scepticism, 185-6, 209, 218
Science, 23, 25, 27, 28, 44; and
art, 74; physical, 77; and the
real, 131, 198, 207-12, 235, 239
Schleiermacher, 291
Security, Ch. I, passim, 26, 32, 34,
37, 127, 179, 196; see Control,
Values
302
THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY
Sensational Empiricism, 25, 106,
118, 150, 159, 164, 170
Sense, 81, 86-8, 109, 137, 150, 163,
220, 246; see Data, Perception
Sense-Data, 65, 167-9, ^5
Signs, 97, 124, 127, 167, 203, 225,
228, 230
Simultaneity, 139
Social Knowledge and Objects, 178,
190,207-9,257
Solutions, see Problems, Secunty,
Thought
Space, 121, 128, 137, 153
Spectator Theory of Knowledge,
see Vision
Spencer, H., 64
Spinoza, B., 54-8, 136, 200, 274,
291
Standards, 54, 156, 161, 163, 192,
228, 243, 261, 263; see Test,
Validity
Structure, 143, 157
Subjective and Subjectivism, 33,
47, 60, 144, 204, 221, 228, 230-1,
235, 261-2, 266, 273
Substance, 116, 124, 178, 197, 288
Supernatural, 14, 219
Symbols, i45~9, 207
Taste, 250
Technology, 74, 79, 119, 128, 256
Tertiary, see Qualities
Test, 100, 106, 118, 120, 124, 131,
150-60, 226, 265
Theology, 1 8, 30, 52, 74
Theory, placed above action, 9, 10,
25, 31; in relation to practice,
67-70, 184-5, 267
This and The, 226
Thought, n, 105; as directed
activity, 119, 129, 155, 160, 213,
254; defined, 214, 217
Time and Temporal, 92, 99, 121,
128,' 137, 139, 223, 254, 259
Tools, 12, 82, 87, 119, 130, 131,
143, 146, 178, 179, 259, 264; see
Instrumental
Tradition, Classic, 12, 20, 24, 28-
30, 35, 44, 75, 129, 191, 204, 221,
273-4, 278
Transcendentalism, 35, 60, 77, 158,
245, 271
Trxith,see Antecedents, Consequences ,
Test, Validity
Ubiquity of Knowledge, 103, 127,
171, 209, 230, 277-81, 282-3
Uncertainty, 39-40, 65, 213-26,
233
Uniformity, 156-7, 199
Universals, 23, 136, 148, 155, 156
Use and Utility, 41, 102
Utilitarianism, 33, 245
Validity, 44, 60, 106, 124, 136, 141,
188,250
Values, 24, 27, 32, 33, 36, 40,
43, 65-6,92, 95, 186, 187, 222,
Ch. X
Verification, see Test, Validity
Vision, as knowledge, 26, 203,
233
Will, 52, 58, 203, 216, 222
Work, as a curse, 8; as material, 9
R u 5 r\m ?L o u se -
GEORGE ALLEN & UNW1N LTD
LONDON: 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C.i
CAPE TOWN: 73 ST. GEORGE'S STREET
SYDNEY, N.S.W. : WYNYARD SQUARE
AUCKLAND, N.Z.: 41 ALBERT STREET
WELLINGTON, N.Z. : 4 WiLLis STREET
TORONTO: 77\VEi.iiNGTON STREET, WEST
Live Music Archive
Librivox Free Audio
Metropolitan Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Internet Arcade
Console Living Room
Books to Borrow
Open Library
TV News
Understanding 9/11