Human experience in the large, in its coarse and conspicuous features, has for one of its most striking features preoccupation with direct enjoyment, feasting and festivities; ornamentation, dance, song, dramatic pantomime, telling yarns and enacting stories. In comparison with intellectual and moral endeavor, this trait of experience has hardly received the attention from philosophers that it demands. Even philosophers who have conceived that pleasure is the sole motive of man and the attainment of happiness his whole aim, have given a curiously sober, drab, account of the working of pleasure and the search for happiness. Consider the utilitarians how they toiled, spun and wove, but who never saw man arrayed in joy as the lilies of the field. Happiness was to them a matter of calculation and effort, of industry guided by mathematical book-keeping. The history of man shows however that man takes his enjoyment neat, and at as short range as possible.
Direct appropriations and satisfactions were prior to anything but the most elementary and exigent prudence, just as the useful arts preceded the sciences. The body is decked before it is clothed. While homes are still hovels, temples and palaces are embellished. Luxuries prevail over necessities except when necessities can be festally celebrated. Men make a game of their fishing and hunting, and turn to the periodic and disciplinary labor of agriculture only when inferiors, women and slaves, cannot be had to do the work. Useful labor is, whenever possible, transformed by ceremonial and ritual accompaniments, subordinated to art that yields immediate enjoyment; otherwise it is attended to under the compulsion of circumstance during abbreviated surrenders of leisure. For leisure permits of festivity, in revery, ceremonies and conversation. The pressure of necessity is, however, never wholly lost, and the sense of it led men, as if with uneasy conscience at their respite from work, to impute practical efficacy to play and rites, endowing them with power to coerce events and to purchase the favor of rulers of events.
But it is possible to magnify the place of magical exercise and superstitious legend. The primary interest lies in staging the show and enjoying the spectacle, in givkig play to the ineradicable interest in stories which illustrate the contingencies of existence combined with happier endings for emergencies than surrounding conditions often permit. It was not conscience that kept men loyal to cults and rites, and faithful to tribal myths. So far as it was not routine, it was enjoyment of the drama of life without the latter's liabilities that kept piety from decay. Interest in rites as means of influencing the course of things, and the cognitive or explanation office of myths were hardly more than an embroidery, repeating in pleasant form the pattern which inexpugnable necessities imposed upon practice. When rite and myth are spontaneous rehearsal of the impact and career of practical needs and doings, they must also seem to have practical force. The political significance of July Fourth, 1776, is perhaps renewed by the juvenile celebrations of Independence Day, but this effect hardly accounts for the fervor of the celebration. Any excuse serves for a holiday and the more the holiday is decked out with things that contrast with the pressure of workaday life while re-enacting its form, the more a holiday it is. The more unrestrained the play of fancy the greater the contrast. The supernatural has more thrills than the natural, the customary; holidays and holy-days are indistinguishable. Death is an occasion for a wake, and mourning is acclaimed with a board of funeral meats.
Reflected upon, this phase of experience manifests objects which are final. The attitude involved in their appreciation is esthetic. The operations entering into their production is fine art, distinguished from useful art. It is dangerous however to give names, especially hi discourse that is far aloof from the things named-direct enjoyment of the interplay of the contingent and the effective, purged of practical risks and penalties. Esthetic, fine art, appreciation, drama have an eulogistic flavor. We hesitate to call the penny-dreadful of fiction artistic, so we call it debased fiction or a travesty on art. Most sources of direct enjoyment for the masses are not art to the cultivated, but perverted art, an unworthy indulgence. Thus we miss the point. A passion of anger, a dream, relaxation of the limbs after effort, swapping of jokes, horse-play, beating of drums, blowing of tin whistles, explosion of firecrackers and walking on stilts, have the same quality of immediate and absorbing finality that is possessed by things and acts dignified by the title of esthetic. For man is more preoccupied with enhancing life than with bare living; so that a sense of living when it attends labor and utility is borrowed not intrinsic, having been generated in those periods of relief when activity was dramatic.
To say these things is only to say that man is naturally more interested in consummations than he is in preparations; and that consummations have first to be hit upon spontaneously and accidentally-as the baby gets food and all of us are warmed by the sun-before they can be objects of foresight, invention and industry. Consciousness so far as it is not dull ache and torpid comfort is a thing of the imagination. The extensions and transformations of existence generated in imagination may come at last to attend work so as to make it significant and agreeable. But when men are first at the height of business, they are too busy to engage either in fancy or reflective inquiry. At the outset the hunt was enjoyed in the feast, or in the calm moments of shaping spears, bows and arrows. Only later was the content of these experiences carried over into hunting itself, so that even its dangers might be savored. Labor, through its structure and order, lends play its pattern and plot; play then returns the loan with interest to work, in giving it a sense of beginning, sequence and climax. As long as imagined objects are satisfying^ the logic of drama, of suspense, thrill and success, dominates the logic of objective events. Cosmogonies are mythological not because savages indulge in defective scientific explanations, but because objects of imagination are consummately in the degree in which they exuberantly escape from the pressure of natural surroundings, even when they re-enact its crises. The congenial is first form of the consistent.
As Goldenweiser says, if supernaturalism prevails in early culture it is largely because, "the phantasmagoria of supernaturalism is esthetically attractive, it has beauty of thought and form and of movement, it abounds in delightful samples of logical coherence, and is full of fascination for the creator, the systematizer and the beholder." And it is safe to add, that the esthetic character of logical coherence rather than its tested coherence with fact is that which yields the delight. Again speaking of the place of ceremonialism in early culture, Goldenweiser well characterizes it as a kind of "psychic incandescence;" because of its presence, there is "no cooling of the ever glowing mass (the conglomerate of customs) no flagging of the emotions, no sinking of the cultural associations to the more precarious level of purely ideational connections."
Modern psychiatry as well as anthropology have demonstrated the enormous role of symbolism in human experience. The word symbolism, however, is a product of reflection upon direct phenomena, not a description of what happens when so-called symbols are potent. For the feature which characterizes symbolism is precisely that the thing which later reflection calls a symbol is not a symbol, but a direct vehicle, a concrete embodiment, a vital incarnation. To find its counterpart we should betake ourselves not to signal flags which convey information, ideas and direction, but to a national flag in moments of intense emotional stir of a devout patriot. Symbolism in this sense dominates not only all early art and cult but social organization as well. Rites, designs, patterns are all charged with a significance which we may call mystic, but which is immediate and direct to those who have and celebrate them. Be the origin of the totem what it may, it is not a cold, intellectual sign of a social organization; it is that organization made present and visible, a centre of emotionally charged behavior. It is not otherwise with the symbolism uncovered in dreams and neurotic states by psychological analysis. Such symbols are not indicative or intellectual signs; they are condensed substitutes of actual things and events, which embody actual things with more direct and enchanced import than do the things themselves with their distractions, imposition, and irrelevances. Meanings are intellectually distorted and depressed, but immediately they are heightened and concentrated.
Jesperson speaks of the origin of language in similar terms. He says that many linguistic philosophers appear to "imagine our primitive ancestors after their own image as serious and well meaning men, endowed with a large share of common sense They leave you with the impression that these first framers of speech were sedate citizens with a strong interest in the purely business and matter of fact aspects of life." But Jesperson finds that the prosaic side of early culture was capable only "of calling forth shojt monosyllabic interjections; they are the most immutable portions of language, and remain now at essentially the same standpoint as thousands of years ago." He concludes that the "genesis of language is found .... in the poetic side of life; the source of speech is not gloomy seriousness, but merry play and youthful hilarity." And no one would deny, I suppose that literature rather than business and science has developed and fixed our present linguistic resources.
It would be difficult to find a fact more significant of the traits of nature, more instructive for a naturalistic metaphysics of existence, than this cleavage of the things of human experience into actual but hard objects, and enjoyed but imagined objects. One might think that philosophers in their search for some datum that possesses properties that put it beyond doubt, might have directed their attention to this direct phase of experience, in which objects are not a matter of sensations, ideas, beliefs or knowledge, but are something had and enjoyed. All that "self-evidence" can intelligibly mean is obviousness of presence; commonplaces like human interest in the things of sport and celebration are the most conspicuously obvious of all. In comparison, the "self-evident" things of philosophers are recondite and technical.
The other most self-evident thing in experience is useful labor and its coercive necessity. As direct appreciative enjoyment exhibits things in their consurnmatory phase, labor manifests things in their connections of things with one another, in efficiency, productivity, furthering, hindering, generating, destroying. From the standpoint of enjoyment a thing is what it directly does for us. From that of labor a thing is what it will do to other things-the only way in which a tool or an obstacle can be defined. Extraordinary and subtle reasons have been assigned for belief in the principle of causation. Labor and the use of tools seem, however, to be a sufficient empirical reason: indeed, to be the only empirical events that can be specifically pointed to in this connection. They are more adequate grounds for acceptance of belief in causality than are the regular sequences of nature or than a category of reason, or the alleged fact of will. The first thinker who proclaimed that every event is effect of something and cause of something else, that every particular existence is both conditioned and condition, merely put into words the procedure of the workman, converting a mode of practice into a formula. External regularity is familiar, customary, taken for granted, not thought of, embodied in thoughtless routine. Regularity, orderly sequence, in productive labor presents itself to thought as a controlling principle. Industrial arts are the type-forms of experience that bring to light the sequential connections of things with one another.
In contrast, the enjoyment (with which suffering is to be classed) of things is a declaration that natural existences are not mere passage ways to another passage way, and so on ad infinitum. Thinkers interested in esthetic experience are wont to point out the absurdity of the idea that things are good or valuable only for something else; they dwell on the fact vouchsafed by esthetic appreciation that there are things that have their goodness or value in themselves, which are not cherished for the sake of anything else. These philosophers usually confine this observation however to human affairs isolated from nature, which they interpret exclusively in terms of labor, or causal connections. But in every event there is something obdurate, self-sufficient, wholly immediate, neither a relation nor an element in a relational whole, but terminal and exclusive. Here, as in so many other matters, materialists and idealists agree in an underlying metaphysics which ignores in behalf of relations and relational systems, those irreducible, infinitely plural, undefinable and indescribable qualities which a thing must have in order to be, and in order to be capable of becoming the subject of relations and a theme of discourse. Immediacy of existence is ineffable. But there is nothing mystical about such ineffability; it expresses the fact that of direct existence it is futile to say anything to one's self and impossible to say anything to another. Discourse can but intimate connections which if followed out may lead one to have an existence. Things in their immediacy are unknown and unknowable, not because they are remote or behind some impenetrable veil of sensation of ideas, but because knowledge has no concern with them. For knowledge is a memorandum of conditions of their appearance, concerned, that is, with sequences, coexistences, relations. Immediate things may be pointed to by words, but not described or denned. Description when it occurs is but a part of a circuitous method of pointing or denoting; index to a starting point and road which if taken may lead to a direct and ineffable presence. To the empirical thinker, immediate enjoyment and suffering are the conclusive exhibition and evidence that nature has its finalities as well as its relationships.
Many modern thinkers, influenced by the notion that knowledge is the only mode of experience that grasps things, assuming the ubiquity of cognition, and noting that immediacy or qualitative existence has no place in authentic science, have asserted that qualities are always and only states of consciousness. It is a reasonable belief that there would be no such thing as "consciousness" if events did not have a phase of brute and unconditioned "isness," of being just what they irreducibly are. Consciousness as sensation, image and emotion is thus a particular case of immediacy occurring under complicated conditions. And also without immediate qualities those relations with which science deals, would have no footing in existence and thought would have nothing beyond itself to chew upon or dig into. Without a basis in qualitative events, the characteristic subject-matter of knowledge would be algebraic ghosts, relations that do not relate. To dispose of things in which relations terminate by calling them elements, is to discourse within a relational and logical scheme. Only if elements are more than just elements in a whole, only if they have something qualitatively their own, can a relational system be prevented from complete collapse.
The Greeks were more naive than we are. Their thinkers were as much dominated by the esthetic characters of experienced objects as modern thinkers are by their scientific and economic (or relational) traits. Consequently they had no difficulty in recognizing the importance of qualities and of things inherently closed or final. They thought of mind as a realization of natural existence or a participation in it. Thus they were saved from the epistemological problem of how things and mind, defined antithetically, can have anything to do with each other. If existence in its immediacies could speak it would proclaim, "I may have relatives but / am not related." In esthetic objects, that is in all immediately enjoyed and suffered things, in things directly possessed, they thus speak for themselves; Greek thinkers heard their voice.
Unfortunately however, these thinkers were not content to speak as artists, of whom they had a low opinion. Since they were thinkers, arming at truth or knowledge, they put art on a lower plane than science; and the only enjoyment they found worth serious attention was that of objects of thought. In consequence they formulated a doctrine in which the esthetic and the rational are confused on principle, and they bequeathed the confusion as an intellectual tradition to their successors. Aristotle spoke more truly than he was aware when he said that philosophy began in leisure "when almost all the necessaries and things that make for comfort and recreation were present." For it was philosophic, rather than scientific "knowledge" which thus began. Philosophy was a telling of the story of nature after the style of all congenial stories, a story with a plot and climax, given such coherent properties as would render it congenial to minds demanding that objects satisfy logical canons.
Objects are certainly none the worse for having wonder and admiration for their inspiration and art for their medium. But these objects are distorted when their affiliation with the epic, temple and drama is denied, and there is claimed for them a rational and cosmic status independent of piety, drama and story. In the classic philosophy of Greece the picture of the world that was constructed on an artistic model preferred itself as being the result of intellectual study. A story composed in the interests of a refined type of enjoyment, ordered by the needs of consistency in discourse, or dialectic, became cosmology and metaphysics. Its authors took toward art and rite much the same sort of superior attitude that the modern esthete takes to vulgar forms of esthetic satisfaction. A claim for superiority in subject matter and mode of artistic treatment was indeed legitimate; but a claim was made for difference in kind. Art was an embellished imitation of the everyday or empirical affairs of life in their natural setting; philosophy was science, an envisagement of realities behind all copies, all phenomena; or a grasp of essences within them forming their valid substance. The delight attending the insight was attributed to the final intrinsic dignity of the cosmic objects perceived by reason, instead of being frankly recognized to be due to a selection and arrangement of things with a view to enhancement of tranquil enjoyment.
Devotion to rites, stories and revery springs on its magical side from practical desire to control the contingent; but in larger measure it embodies the happiness that attends the sense of successful issue from the uncertainly hazardous. Imagination is primarily dramatic, rather than lyric, whether it takes the form of the play enacted on the stage, of the told story or silent soliloquy. The constant presence of instability and trouble gives depth and poignancy to the situations in which are pictured their subordination to final issues possessed of calm and certainty. To re-enact the vicissitudes, crises and tragedies of life under conditions that deprive them of their overt dangers, is the natural r61e of "consciousness," which is tamed to respect actualities only when circumstance enforces the adoption of the method of labor, a discipline that is fortunate if it retain some of the liberation from immediate exigencies which characterizes dramatic imagination.
Modern critics of esthetics have criticized the conception of Plato and Aristotle that art is imitation. But in its original statement, this conception was a description of the observed facts of drama, music and epic rather than theoretical interpretation. For these thinkers were not so stupid as to hold that art is an imitation of inert things; they held that it was a mimesis of the critical and climatic behavior of natural forces within human career and destiny. Such a reproduction is naturally in a new and liberal medium; it permits idealization, but the idealization is of natural events. It is self-sufficing, an end in itself, while the events seem to exist only to render the perfection of an idealized reproduction possible and pertinent. Resort to esthetic objects is the spontaneous human escape and consolation in a trying and difficult world. A world that consisted entirely of stable objects directly presented and possessed would have no esthetic qualities; it would just be, and would lack power to satisfy and to inspire. Objects are actually esthetic when they turn hazard and defeat to an issue which is above and beyond trouble and vicissitude. Festal celebration and consummatory delights belong only in a world that knows risk and hardship.
Greek philosophy as well as Greek art is a memorial of the joy in what is finished, when it is found amid a world of unrest, struggle, and uncertainty in what, since it is ended, does not commit us to the uncertain hazards of what is still going on. Without such experiences as those of Greek art it is hardly conceivable that the craving for the passage of change into rest, of the contingent, mixed and wandering into the composed and total, would have found a model after which to design a universe like the cosmos of Platonic and Aristotelian tradition. Form was the first and last word of philosophy because it had been that of art; form is change arrested in a prerogative object. It conveys a sense of the imperishable and timeless, although the material in which it is exemplified is subject to decay and contingency. It thus conveys an intimation of potentialities completely actualized in a happier realm, where events are not events, but are arrested and brought to a close in an eternal self-sustaining activity. Such a realm is intrinsically one of secure and self-possessed meaning. It consists of objects of immediate enjoyment hypostasized into transcendent reality. Such was the conversion of Greek esthetic contemplation effected by Greek reflection.
The technical structure of the resulting metaphysics is familiar. The cosmically real is one with the finished, the perfect, or wholly done. Even with Aristotle, a coldly defining theory, called metaphysics, of the traits of Being, becomes a theology, or science of ultimate and eternal reality to which only ecstatic predicates are attributable. It consists of pure forms, self-sufficient, self-enclosed and self-sustaining; self-movement or life at eternal full-tide. Forms are ideal, and the ideal is the rational apprehended by reason. The material for this point of view was found empirically in what is consummatory and final; and the dominion exercised by art in Greek culture fostered and enhanced attention to objects of this immediately enjoyed kind. To the spectator, artistic objects are given; they need only to be envisaged; Greek reflection, carried on by a leisure class in the interest of liberalizing leisure, was preeminently that of the spectator, not that of the participator in processes of production. Labor, production, did not seem to create form, it dealt with matter or changing things so as to furnish an occasion for incarnation of antecedent forms in matter. To artisans form is alien, unperceived and unenjoyed; absorbed in laboring with material, they live in a world of change and matter, even when their labors have an end in manifestation of form. Plato was so troubled by the consequences of this ignorance of form on the part of all who live in the world of practice, industrial and political, that he elaborated a plan by which their activities might be regulated by those who, above labor and entanglement in change and practice, provide in laws forms to shape the habits of those who work. Aristotle escaped the dilemma by putting nature above art, and endowing nature with skilled purpose that for the most part achieves ends or completions. Thus the r61e of the human artisan whether in industry or politics became relatively negligible, and the miscarriages of human art a matter of relative insignificance.
The Aristotelian conception of four-fold "causation" is openly borrowed from the arts, which for the artisan are utilitarian and menial, and are "fine" or liberal only for the cultivated spectator who is possessed of leisure- that is, is relieved from the necessity of partaking laboriously in change and matter. Nature is an artist that works from within instead of from without. Hence all change, or matter, is potentiality for finished objects. Like other artists, nature first possesses the forms which it afterwards embodies. When arts follow fixed models, whether in making shoes, houses, or dramas, and when the element of individual invention in design is condemned as caprice, forms and ends are necessarily external to the individual worker. They preceded any particular realization. Design and plan are anonymous and universal, and carry with them no suggestion of a designing, purposive mind. Models are objectively given and have only to be observed and followed. Thus there was no diffi-culty, such as one may feel to-day, in ascribing definite and regulative forms to the changes of nature, which are actualized in objects that are finalities, closures of change. The actualization in an organic body of the forms that are found in things constitutes mind as the end of nature. Their immediate possession and celebration constitutes consciousness, as far as the idea of consciousness is found in Greek thought.
This doctrine was not an arbitrary speculation; it flowed naturally from the fact that Greek thinkers were fortunate to find ready-made to hand and eye a realm of esthetic objects with traits of order and proportion, form and finality. The arts were pursued upon the basis of a fund of realized, objective and impersonal designs and plans, which were prior to individual devising and execution rather than products of individual purpose and invention. The philosophers did not create out of their own speculations, the idea of materials subdued to the acceptance and manifestation of objective forms. They found the fact in the art of their period, translating it into an intellectual formula. Philosophers were not the authors of an identification of objects informed with ideal order and proportion with a final and arresting outcome of processes of antecedent change. That identification was at least implicit in the operation of artisans. Nor were the philosophers the originators of the idea that mental appropriation of some objects is intrinsically a state of elevated satisfaction. That fact was given to them in the esthetic culture of their civilization. What the philosophers are responsible for is a peculiar one-sided interpretation of these empirical facts, an interpretation, however, which has its roots in features, although less admirable ones, of Greek culture.
For the Greek community was marked by a sharp separation of servile workers and free men of leisure, which meant a division between acquaintance with matters of fact and contemplative appreciation, between unintelligent practice and unpractical intelligence, between affairs of change and efficiency-or instrumentality-and of rest and enclosure-finality. Experience afforded therefore no model for a conception of experimental inquiry and of reflection efficacious in action. In consequence, the sole notability, intelligibility, of nature was conceived to reside in objects that were ends, since they set limits to change. Changing things were not capable of being known on the basis of relationship to one another, but only on the basis of their relationship to objects beyond change, because marking its limit, and immediately precious. The terminal objects lent changing objects the properties which made them knowable; such stability of character as they possessed was derived from the form of the end-objects toward which they moved. Hence an inherent appetition or nisus toward these terminal and static objects was attributed to them. The whole scheme of cosmic change was a vehicle for attaining ends possessed of properties which caused them to be objects of attraction of all lesser things, rendering the latter uneasy and restless until they attained the end-object which constitutes their real nature. Thus an immediate contemplative possession and enjoyment of objects, dialectically ordered, was interpreted as defining both true knowledge and the highest end and good of nature. A doctrine of morals, of what is better in reflective choice, was thus converted into a metaphysics and science of Being, the moral aspect being disguised to the modern mind by the fact that the highest good was conceived esthetically, instead of in the social terms which upon the whole dominate modern theories of morality.
The doctrine that objects as ends are the proper objects of science, because they are the ultimate forms of real being, met its doom in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Essences and forms were attacked as occult; "final causes" were either wholly denied or relegated to a divine realm too high for human knowledge. The doctrine of natural ends was displaced by a doctrine of designs, ends-in-view, conscious aims constructed and entertained in individual minds independent of nature. Descartes, Spinoza and Kant are upon this matter at least in agreement with Bacon, Hume and Helvetius. The imputation to natural events of cosmic appetition towards ends, the notion that their changes were to be understood as efforts to reach a natural state of rest and perfection, were indicated as the chief source of sterility and fantasy in science; the syllogistic logic connected with the doctrine was discarded as verbal, polemical, and at its best irrelevant to the subtle operations of nature; purpose and contingency were alike relegated to the purely human and personal; nature was evacuated of qualities and became a homogeneous mass differentiated by differences of homogeneous motion in a homogeneous space. Mechanical relations, which Greek thought had rejected as equivalent to the chaotic reign of pure accident, became the head corner-stone of the conception of law, of uniformity and order. If ends were recognized at all, it was only under the caption of design, and design was defined as conscious aim rather than as objective order and architechtonic form. Wherever the influence of modern physics penetrated, the classic theory became remote, faded, factitious, with its assertion that natural changes are inherent movements toward objects which are their fulfillments or perfections, so that the latter are true objects of knowledge, supplying the forms or characters under which alone changes may be known. With the decay of this doctrine, departed also belief in cosmic qualitative differences and kinds, so that of necessity quality and immediacy had no recourse, expelled from objective nature, save to take refuge in personal consciousness.
Is this reversal of classic theories of existence inevitable? Must belief in ends involved in nature itself be surrendered, or be asserted only by means of a roundabout examination of the nature of knowledge which starting from conscious intent to know, finally infers that the universe is a vast, non-natural fulfillment of a conscious intent? Or is there an ingredient of truth in ancient metaphysics which may be extracted and re-affirmed? Empirically, the existence of objects of direct grasp, possession, use and enjoyment cannot be denied. Empirically, things are poignant, tragic, beautiful, humorous, settled, disturbed, comfortable, annoying, barren, harsh, consoling, splendid, fearful; are such immediately and in their own right and behalf. If we take advantage of the word esthetic in a wider sense than that of application to the beautiful and ugly, esthetic quality, immediate, final or self-enclosed, indubitably characterizes natural situations as they empirically occur. These traits stand in themselves on precisely the same level as colors, sounds, qualities of contact, taste and smell. Any criterion that finds the latter to be ultimate and "hard" data will, impartially applied, come to the same conclusion about the former. Any quality as such is final; it is at once initial and terminal; just what it is as it exists. It may be referred to other things, it may be treated as an effect or as a sign. But this involves an extraneous extension and use. It takes us beyond quality in its immediate qualitativeness. If experienced things are valid evidence, then nature in having qualities within itself has what in the literal sense must be called ends, terminals, arrests, enclosures.
It is dangerous to venture at all upon the use of the word "ends" in connection with existential processes. Apologetic and theological controversies cluster about it and affect its signification. Barring this connotation, the word has an almost inexpugnable honorific flavor, so that to assert that nature is characterized by ends, the most conspicuous of which is the life of mind, seems like engaging in an eulogistic, rather than an empirical account of nature. Something much more neutral than any such implication is, however, meant. We constantly talk about things coming or drawing to a close; getting ended, finished, done with, over with. It is a ttommonplace that no thing lasts forever. We may be glad or we may be sorry but that is wholly a matter of the kmd of history which is being ended. We may conceive the end, the close, as due to fulfillment, perfect attainment, to satiety, or to exhaustion, to dissolution, to something having run down or given out. Being an end may be indifferently an ecstatic culmination, a matter-of-fact consummation, or a deplorable tragedy. Which of these things a closing or terminal object is, has nothing to do with the property of being an end.
The genuine implications of natural ends may be brought out by considering beginnings instead of endings. To insist that nature is an affair of beginnings is to assert that there is no one single and all-at-once beginning of everything. It is but another way of saying that nature is an affair of affairs, wherein each one, no matter how linked up it may be with others, has its own quality. It does not imply that every beginning marks an advance or improvement; as we sadly know accidents, diseases, wars, lies and errors, begin. Clearly the fact and idea of beginning is neutral, not eulogistic; temporal, not absolute. And since wherever one thing begins something else ends, what is true of beginnings is true of endings. Popular fiction and drama shows the bias of human nature in favor of happy endings, but by being fiction and drama they show with even greater assurance that unhappy endings are natural events.
To minds inured to the eulogistic connotation of ends, such a neutral interpretation of the meaning of ends as has just been set forth may seem to make the doctrine of ends a matter of indifference. If ends are only endings or closings of temporal episodes, why bother to call attention to ends at all, to say nothing of framing a theory of ends and dignifying it with the name of natural teleology? In the degree, however, in which the mind is weaned from partisan and ego-centric interest, acknowledgement of nature as a scene of incessant beginnings and endings, presents itself as the source of philosophic enlightenment. It enables thought to apprehend causal mechanisms and temporal finalities as phases of the same natural processes, instead of as competitors where the gain of one is the loss of the other. Mechanism is the order involved in an historic occurrence, capable of definition in terms of the order which various histories sustain to each other. Thus it is the instrumentality of control of any particular termination since a sequential order involves the last term.
The traditional conception of natural ends was to the effect that nature does nothing in vain; the accepted meaning of this phrase was that every change is for the sake of something which does not change, occurring in its behalf. Thus the mind started with a ready-made list of good things or perfections which it was the business of nature to accomplish. Such a view may verbally distinguish between something called efficient causation and something else called final causation. But in effect the distinction is only between the causality of the master who contents himself with uttering an order and the efficacy of the servant who actually engages in the physical work of execution. It is only a way of attributing ultimate causality to what is ideal and mental-the directive order of the master-, while emancipating it from the supposed degradation of physical labor in carrying it out, as well as avoiding the difficulties of inserting an immaterial cause within the material realm. But in a legitimate account of ends as endings, all directional order resides in the sequential order. This no more occurs for the sake of the end than a mountain exists for the sake of the peak which is its end. A musical phrase has a certain close, but the earlier portion does not therefore exist for the sake of the close as if it were something which is done away with when the close is reached. And so a man is not an adult until after he has been a boy, but childhood does not exist for the sake of maturity.
By the nature of the case, causality, however it be defined, consists in the sequential order itself, and not in a last term which as such is irrelevant to causality, although it may, of course be, in addition, an initial term in another sequential order. The view held-or implied-by some "mechanists", which treats an initial term as if it had an inherent generative force which it somehow emits and bestows upon its successors, is all of a piece with the view held by teleologists which implies that an end brings about its own antecedents. Both isolate an event from the history in which it belongs and in which it has its character. Both make a factitiously isolated position in a temporal order a mark of true reality, one theory selecting initial place and the other final place. But in fact causality is another name for the sequential order itself; and since this is an order of a history having a beginning and end, there is nothing more absurd than setting causality over against either initiation or finality.
The same considerations permit a naturalistic interpretation of the ideas of dynamic and static. Every end is as such static; this statement is but a truism; changing into something else, a thing is obviously transitive, not final. Yet the thing which is a close of one history is always the beginning of another, and in this capacity the thing in question is transitive or dynamic. This statement also is tautology, for dynamic does not mean possessed of "force" or capable of emitting it so as to stir up other things and set them in motion; it means simply change in a connected series of events. The traditional view of force points necessarily to something transcendental, because outside of events, whether called God or Will or The Unknowable. So the traditional view of the static points to something fixed and rigid, incapable of change, and therefore also outside the course of things and consequently non-empirical. Empirically, however, there is a history which is a succession of histories, and in which any event is at once both beginning of one course and close of another; is both transitive and static. The phrase constantly in our mouths, "state of affairs" is accurately descriptive, although it makes sheer nonsense in both the traditional spiritual and mechanistic theories. There are no changes that do not enter into an affair, Res, and there is no affair that is not bounded and thereby marked off as a state or condition. When a state of affairs is perceived, the perceiving-of-a-state-of-affairs is a further state of affairs. Its subject-matter is a thing in the idiomatic sense of thing, res, whether a solar-system, a stellar constellation, or an atom, a diversified and more or less loosely interconnection of events, falling within boundaries sufficiently definite to be capable of being approximately traced. Such is the unbiased evidence of experience in gross, and such in effect is the conclusion of recent physics as far as a layman can see. For this reason, and not because of any unique properties of a separate kind of existence, called psychic or mental, every situation or field of consciousness is marked by initiation, direction or intent, and consequence or import. What is unique is not these traits, but the property of awareness or perception. Because of this property, the initial stage is capable of being judged in the light of its probable course and consequence. There is anticipation. Each successive event being a stage in a serial process is both expectant and commemorative. What is more precisely pertinent to our present theme, the terminal outcome when anticipated (as it is when a moving cause of affairs is perceived) becomes an end-in-view, an aim, purpose, a prediction usable as a plan in shaping the course of events. In classic Greek thought, the perception of ends was simply an esthetic contemplation of the forms of objects in which natural processes were completed. In most modern thought, it is an arbitrary creation of private mental operations guided by personal desire, the theoretical alternative being that they are finite copies of the fulfilled intentions of an infinite mind. In empirical fact, they are projections of possible consequences; they are ends-in-view. The in-viewness of ends is as much conditioned by antecedent natural conditions as is perception of contemporary objects external to the organism, trees and stones, or whatever. That is, natural processes must have actually terminated in specifiable consequences, which give those processes definition and character, before ends can be mentally entertained and be the objects of striving desire. In so far, we must side with Greek thought. But empirical ends-in-view are distinguished in two important respects from ends as they are conceived in classic thought. They are not objects of contemplative possession and use, but are intellectual and regulative means, degenerating into reminiscences or dreams unless they are employed as plans within the state of affairs. And when they are attained, the objects which they inform are conclusions and fulfillments, only as these objects are the consequence of prior reflection, deliberate choice and directed effort are they fulfillments, conclusions, completions, perfections. A natural end which occurs without the intervention of human art is a terminus, a de facto boundary, but it is not entitled to any such honorific status of completions and realizations as classic metaphysics assigned them.
When we regard conscious experience, that is to say, the object and qualities characteristic of conscious life, as a natural end, we are bound to regard all objects impartially as distinctive ends in the Aristotelian sense. We cannot pick or choose; when we do pick and choose we are obviously dealing with practical ends-with objects and qualities that are deemed worthy of selection by reflective, deliberate choice. These "ends" are not the less natural, if we have an eye to the continuity of experienced objects with other natural occurrences, but they are not ends without the intervention of a special affair, reflective survey and choice. But popular thought, in accord with the Greek tradition, picks and chooses among all ends those which it likes and honors, at the same time ignoring and implicitly denying the act of choice. Like those who regard a happy escape from a catastrophe as a providential intervention, neglecting all who have not escaped, popular teleology regards good objects as natural ends, bad objects and qualities being regarded as mere accidents or incidents,regrettable mechanical excess or defect. Popular teleology like Greek metaphysics, has accordingly been apologetic, justificatory of the beneficence of nature; it has been optimistic in a complacent way.
Primitive man like naive common sense imputes terminating qualities to nature-in which it follows a sound realistic metaphysics. But it also imputes to them the property of causal determination, an imputation rejected by science. Rejection by science does not prove these qualities to be mere "subjective" or "private" appearances; it only shows that they are termini, closings of serial events. Events that achieve and possess them are linked, mediatory, transitive, indicative, and the proper material of knowledge. From the standpoint of causal sequence, or the order with which science is concerned, qualities are superfluous, irrelevant and immaterial. We could never predict their occurrence from the fullest acquaintance with the properties that form the objects of knowledge as such.
From the standpoint of the latter, the relational orders, ends are abrupt and interruptive. Hence to a philosophy that takes the subject-matter of knowledge to be exclusive and exhaustive-as so much of modern philosophy has done-they form a most perplexing problem, a mystery. For with extrusive and superfluous status they combine the property of being permeating and absorbing. They alone, as we say, are of interest, and they are the cause of taking interest in other things. For living creatures they form the natural platform for regarding other things. They are the basis, directly and indirectly, of active response to things. As compared with them, other things are obstacles and means of procuring and avoiding the occurrence of situations having them. When the word "consciousness" is-as it often is-used for a short name for the sum total of such immediate qualities as actually present themselves, it is the end or terminus of natural events. As such it is also gratuitous, superfluous and inexplicable when reality is defined in terms of the relational objects of science.
By "ends" we also mean ends-in-view, aims, things viewed after deliberation as worthy of attainment and as evocative of effort. They are formed from objects taken in their immediate and terminal qualities; objects once having occurred as endings, but which are not now in existence and which are not likely to come into existence save by an action which modifies surroundings. Classic metaphysics is a confused union of these two sense of ends, the primarily natural and the secondarily natural, or practical, moral. Each meaning is intelligible, grounded, legitimate in itself. But their mixture is one of the Great Bads of philosophy. For it treats as natural ends apart from reflection just those objects that are worthy and excellent to reflective choice. Popular teleology has unknowingly followed the leadings that controlled Greek thought; spiritualistic quasi-theological metaphysics has consciously adopted the latter's point of view.
The features of this confused metaphysics are: First, elimination from the status of natural ends of all objects that are evil and troublesome; Secondly, the grading of objects selected to constitute natural ends into a fixed, unchangeable hierarchical order. Objects that possess and import qualities of struggle, suffering and defeat are regarded not as ends, but as frustrations of ends, as accidental and inexplicable deviations. Theology has resorted to an act of original sin to make their occurrence explicable, Greek metaphysics resorted to the presence in nature of a recalcitrant, obdurate, factor. To this pro-vincially exclusive view of natural termini, popular teleology adds a ranking of objects according to which some are more completely ends than others, until there is reached an object which is only end, never eventful and temporal-the end. The hierarchy is explicit in Greek thought: first, and lowest are vegetative ends, normal growth and reproduction; second in rank, come animal ends, locomotion and sensibility; third in rank, are ideal and rational ends, of which the highest is blissful contemplative possession in thought of all the forms of nature. In this gradation, each lower rank while an end is also means or preformed condition of higher ends. Empirical things, things of useful arts, belonging to the second class but, affected by an adventitious mixture of thought, are ultimately instrumentalities potential for the life of pure rational possession of ideal objects. Modern teleologics are much less succinct and definite, they agree however in the notion of rows of inferior ends which prepare for and culminate in something which is the end.
Such a classificatory enterprise is naturally consoling to those who enjoy a privileged status, whether as philosophers, as saints or scholars, and who wish to justify their special status. But its consoling apologetics should not blind us to the fact that to think of objects as more or less ends is nonsense. They either have immediate and terminal quality; or they do not: quality as such is absolute not comparative. A thing may be of some shade of blue when compared with some quality that is wanted and striven for; but its blue is not itself more or less blue nor than blueness, and so with the quality of being terminal and absorbing. Objects may be more or less absorptive and arresting and thus possess degrees of intensity with respect to finality. But this difference of intensity is not, save as subject to reflective choice, a distinction in rank or class of finality. It applies to different toothaches as well as to different objects of thought; but it does not apply, inherently, to the difference between a tooth-ache and an ideal object-save that a thing like a toothache is often possessed of greater intensity of finality. If we follow the clew of the latter fact, we shall probably conclude that search for pure and unalloyed finality carries us to inarticulate sensation and overwhelming passion. For such affairs are the best instances of things that are complete in themselves with no outleadings.
If then rational essences or meanings are better objects of contemplation than are seizures by sensory and passionate objects, it is not because the former are fulfillments of higher or more "real" antecedent processes. They are not graded on the basis of being lesser or greater actualizations. It is because they present themselves to reflective appraisal as more worthy to be striven for. And this rational character implies that the things which have the better qualities possess also transitiveness, instrumentality, as well as immediacy and finality. They are potential and productive. They lead somewhere, perhaps to other affairs having qualities to be envisaged and deeply meditated. If dialectic were not so esthetically enjoyable to some, it would never have played the role it has played in liberating man from the dominion of sensation and impulse. This shows that the esthetic object may be useful and an useful one esthetic, or that immediacy and efficacy1 though distinguishable qualities are not disjoined existentially. But it is no reason for making contemplative knowledge or any other particular affair the highest of all natural ends. Whether the given or the deliberately constructed is a better or higher end is not a question of intrinsic quality, but a matter of reflectively determined judgment. It is conceivable that just because certain objects are immediately good, that which secures and extends their occurrence may itself become for reflective choice a supreme immediate good.
History is full of ingratitude. All existences are something more than products; they have qualities of their own and assert independent life. There is something of King Lear's daughters in all offspring. This ingratitude is reproachable only when it turns to deny its ancestry. That Plato and Aristotle should have borrowed from the communal objects of the fine arts, from ceremonies, worship and the consummatory objects of Greek culture, and should have idealized their borrowings into new objects of art is something to be thankful for. That, after having enforced the loan, they spurned the things from which they derived their models and criteria is not so admirable. This lack of piety concealed from them the poetic and religious character of their own constructions, and established in the classic Western philosophic tradition the notions that immediate grasp and incorporation of objects is knowledge; that things are placed in graded reality in accordance with their capacity to afford a cultivated mind such a grasp or beholding; and that the order of reality in Being is coincident with a predetermined rank of Ends.
If we recognize that all qualities directly had in conscious experience apart from use made of them, testify to nature's characterization by immediacy and finality, there is ground for unsophisticated recognition of use and enjoyment of things as natural, as belonging to the things as well as to us. Things are beautiful and ugly, lovely and hateful, dull and illuminated, attractive and repulsive. Stir and thrill in us is as much theirs as is length, breadth, and thickness. Even the utility of things, their capacity to be employed as means and agencies, is first of all not a relation, but a quality possessed, immediately possessed, it is as esthetic as any other quality. If labor transforms an orderly sequence into a means of attaining ends, this not only converts a casual ending into a fulfillment, but it also gives labor an immediate quality of finality and consummation. Art, even fine art, is long, as well as a joy.
From the standpoint of control and utilization, the tendency to assign superior reality to causes is explicable. A "cause" is not merely an antecedent; it is that antecedent which if manipulated regulates the occurrence of the consequent. This is why the sun rather than night is the causal condition of day. Knowing that consequences will take care of themselves if conditions can be had and managed, an ineradicable natural pragmatism indulges in a cheap and short conversion, and conceives the cause as intrinsically more primary and necessary. This practical tendency is increased by the fact that time is a softener and dignifier; present troubles lose their acuteness when they are no longer present. Old tunes are proverbially the good old tunes, and history begins with a Garden of Paradise or a Golden Age. Good, being congenial, is held to be normal; and what is suffered is a deviation, creating the problem of evil. Thus the earlier gets moral dignity as well as practical superiority. But in existence, or metaphysically, cause and effect are on the same level; they are portions of one and the same historic process, each having immediate or esthetic quality and each having efficacy, or serial connection. Since existence is historic it can be known or understood only as each portion is distinguished and related. For knowledge "cause" and "effect" alike have a partial and truncated being. It is as much a part of the real being of atoms that they give rise in time, under increasing complication of relationships, to qualities of blue and sweet, pain and beauty, as that they have at a cross-section of time extension, mass, or weight.
The problem is neither psychological nor epistemologi-cal. It is metaphysical or existential. It is whether existence consists of events, or is possessed of temporal quality, characterized by beginning, process and ending. If so, the affair of later and earlier, however important it is for particular practical matters, is indifferent to a theory of valuation of existence. It is as arbitrary to assign complete reality to atoms at the expense of mind and conscious experience as it is to make a rigid separation between here and there in space. Distinction is genuine and for some purpose necessary. But it is not a distinction of kinds or degrees of reality. Space here is joined to space there, and events then are joined to events now; the reality is as much in the joining as in the distinction. In order to control the course of events it is indispensable to know their conditions. But to characterize the conditions, it is necessary to have followed them to some term, which is not fully followed till we arrive at something enjoyed or suffered, had and used, in conscious experience. Vital and conscious events exhibit actualization of properties that are not fully displayed in the simpler relationships that are by definition termed physical.
Temporal quality is however not to be confused with temporal order. Quality is quality, direct, immediate and undefinable. Order is a matter of relation, of definition, dating, placing and describing. It is discovered in reflection, not directly had and denoted as is temporal quality. Temporal order is a matter of science; temporal quality is an immediate trait of every occurrence whether in or out of consciousness. Every event as such is passing into other things, in such a way that a later occurrence is an integral part of the character or nature of present existence. An "affair", Res, is always at issue whether it concerns chemical change, the emergence of life, language, mind or the episodes that compose human history. Each comes from something else and each when it comes has its own initial, unpredictable, immediate qualities, and its own similar terminal qualities. The later is never just resolved into the earlier. What we call such resolution is merely a statement of the order by means of which we regulate the passage of an earlier into the later. We may explain the traits of maturity by better knowledge of childhood, but maturity is never just infancy plus.
It is not easy to distinguish between ends as de facto endings, and ends as fulfillments, and at the same time to bear in mind the connection of the latter with the former. We respond so directly to some objects in experience with intent to preserve and perpetuate them that it is difficult to keep the conception of a thing as terminus free from the element of deliberate choice and endeavor; when we think of it or discourse about it, we introduce connection. Since we turn away from trouble and suffering, since these things are not the objects of choice and effort save in avoidance, it seems forced to call them ends. To name them such appears an impropriety of language. I am quite willing to concede the linguistic point, provided its implications are acknowledged and adhered to. For in this case we are left, apart from a deliberately directed course of events, only with objects immediately used, enjoyed and suffered but having in themselves no claim to the title of ends. Health in this case is not in itself an end of any natural process; much less an end-in-itself. It is an enjoyed good when it happens just as disease is a suffered ill. Similarly, truth of belief and statement is an affair that has the quality of good; but it is not an end just because it is good; it becomes an end only when, because of its goodness, it is actively sought for and reached as a conclusion. On this basis, all ends are ends-in-view; they are no longer ideal as characters of Being, as they were when they were in Greek theory, but are the objects of conscious intent. When achieved in existence they are ends because they are then conclusions attained through antecedent endeavor, just as a post is not a goal in itself, but becomes a goal in relation to a runner and his race. Either we must consistently stick to the equivalence of ends with objectives of conscious endeavor, or admit that all things directly possessed of irreducible and self-sufficing quality, red and blue, pain, solidity, toughness, smoothness and so on through the list, are natural ends.
There is however nothing self-evident, or even clear, in the exclusive identification of ends with ends-in-view and of the latter with psychic states. The identification isolates conscious life from objective nature. It was a particular historic situation that effected the division. Modern science made it clear that nature has no preference for good things over bad things; its mills turnout any kind of grist indifferently. If Greek thought had contented itself with asserting that all immediacy of existence has a certain ultimacy and finality, a certain incommensurability and incommutability, if it had cited conscious experience as a striking instance of the indifference of natural processes to termini of good and evil modern science would have had no destructive impact upon the doctrine of natural ends. It would rather have added resourcefulness to this doctrine. In explicit discovery of just the conditions antecedent to this good and that bad, it puts in our hands means of regulating the occurrence of things possessed of these qualities. But discovery of the indifference of natural energies to the production of good and bad endings, and the discovery of the over lapping and intermixture of processes leading to different outcomes, so completely overthrew the classic doctrine of ends, that it seemed to abolish any and every conception of natural ends. The logical result was to cut off "consciousness," as the collectivity of immediate qualities, from nature, and to create the dualism of physical nature and mind which is the source of modern epistemo-logical problems.
A reconsideration of the theory of natural termini, is in historic sequel necessary to a correct envisagement of the connection of conscious life with nature. "Consciousness" in one of its many significations, is identical with direct apparition, obvious and vivid presence of qualities and of meanings. Take these apparitions as something else than emphatic characters of natural events and physical events, and objects become themselves remote and uncertain in existence arrived at only through the mediation of consciousness. Moreover, while quality is immediate and absolute, any particular quality is notoriously unstable and transitory. Immediate objects are the last word of evanescence. Consciousness, in the sense just indicated, is flux in which nothing abides. Persistence, "substance" is found only in some unapproachable things, which have to be invoked to supply this flux with a substratum and locus. Thus we are confronted with the perplexing riddles familiar in epistemo-logical theory. It suffices at this time to note but one. The realm of immediate qualities contains everything of worth and significance. But it is uncertain, unstable and precarious. The first consideration induces us to prize consciousness supremely; the second leads us to deny reality to it as compared with alleged underlying things with their fixity and permanence. Since immediate qualities come and go without inherent rhyme and reason, since life is more unstable than inanimate things and conscious life is even more evanescent than life physiologically considered, since the coming and going of immediate qualities is susceptible of regulation only through the medium of things out of consciousness, "consciousness" becomes an anomaly. "Matter" as a complex of indirect, not immediately given, and in some sense unknowable, things becomes alone real and solid.
If we discount practical bias toward the regular and repeated, and hence toward "causes" as opposed to consequences, all that is indicated by the transiency of immediate qualitative affairs is that immediacy is immediacy. By the nature of the case the occurrence of the immediate is at the mercy of the sequential order. In the case of the things which appeal to common-sense as substances, properties like mass and inertia, unchanged solidity and extension, count most. Rate of change is slow; and presents itself as a matter of attrition and accumulation; spatial qualities which are static chiefly figure. Time is of comparative indifference to the change of solid substances; a million years is a day. But whatever depends for its existence upon the interaction of a large number of independent variables is hi unstable equilibrium; its rate of change is rapid; successive qualities have no obvious connection with one another; any shift of any part may alter the whole pattern. Thus, while light and water are "substances," a rainbow, depending upon a highly specialized conjunction of light and vapor, and being transient, is only a "phenomenon." Such immediate qualities as red and blue, sweet and sour, tone, the pleasant and unpleasant, depend upon an extraordinary variety and complexity of conditioning events; hence they are evanescent. They are never exactly reduplicated, because the exact combination of events of which they are termini does not precisely recur. Hence they are even more "phenomenal" than a rainbow; they must be hitched to substance as its "modes" to get standing in "reality."
Thus the things that are most precious, that are final, being just the things that are unstable and most easily changing,seem to be different in kind from good, solid, old-fashioned substance. Matter has turned out to be nothing like as lumpy and chunky as unimaginative prejudice conceived it to be. But as compared with the changes of immediate qualities it seems in any case solid and substantial; a fact which accounts, I suppose, for the insertion of an immaterial sort of substance, after the analogy of matter-substance, underneath mental affairs. But when it is recognized that the latter are eventual and consummatory to highly complicated interactions of natural events, their transiency becomes itself intelligible; it is no ground of argument for a radical difference from the physical, the latter being also resolvable into a character of the course of events. While "consciousness" as the conspicuous and vivid presence of immediate qualities and of meanings, is alone of direct worth, things not immediately present, whose intrinsic qualities are not directly had, are primary from the standpoint of control. For just because the things that are directly had are both precious and evanescent, the only thing that can be thought of is the conditions under which they are had. The common, pervasive and repeated is of superior rank from the standpoint of safeguarding and buttressing the having of terminal qualities. Directly we can do nothing with the latter save have, enjoy and suffer them. So reflection is concerned with the order which conditions, prevents and secures their occurrence. The irony of many historic systems of philosophy is that they have so inverted the actualities of the case. The general, recurrent and extensive has been treated as the worthy and superior kind of Being; the immediate, intensive, transitory, and qualitatively individualized taken to be of importance only when it is imputed to something ordinary, which is all the universal can denotatively mean. In truth, the universal and stable are important because they are the instrumentalities, the efficacious conditions, of the occurrence of the unique, unstable and passing.
The system which Aristotle bequeathed to the modern world through Latin Christianity expresses the consequences of taking the universal which is instrumental, as if it were final. Actually, consummatory objects instead of being a graded series of numerable and unalterable species or kinds of existence ranked under still fewer genera, are infinitely numerous, variable and individualized affairs. Poets who have sung of despair in the midst of prosperity, and of hope amid darkest gloom, have been the true metaphysicians of nature. The glory of the moment and its tragedy will surely pass. The contingent, uncertain and incomplete give depth and scope to consummatory objects while things not directly had, things approachable only through reflective imagination and rational constructions are the conditions of such regulation of their occurrence as is feasible.
The richer and fuller are the terminal qualities of an object the more precarious is the latter, because of its dependence upon a greater diversity of events. At the best, therefore, control is partial and experimental. All prediction is abstract and hypothetical. Given the stability of other events, and it follows that certain conditions, selected in thought, determine the predictability of the occurrence of say, red. But since the other conditions do not remain unalterably put, what actually occurs is never just what happens in thought; the thing of mere redness does not happen, but some thing with just this shade and tinge of red, in just this unduplicable content. Thus something unpredictable, spontaneous, un-formulable and ineffable is found in any terminal object, Standardizations, formulae, generalizations, principles, universals, have their place, but the place is that of being instrumental to better approximation to what is unique and unrepeatable.
We owe to Romanticism the celebration of this fact; no fact apparently being fully discovered and communicated save as it is too much celebrated. Aversion to Romanticism as a system is quite justifiable; but even an obnoxious system may hit upon a truth unknown to soberer schemes. Call the facts romantic or by some sweeter sounding name, and it still remains true that immediate and terminal qualities (whether or not called consciousness) form an unpredictable and unformulable flow of immediate, shifting, impulsive, adventured finalities, with respect to which the universal and regular objects and principles celebrated in classic thought are instrumental.
Perhaps we may prudently close this chapter with a reminder. To point out something as a fact is not the same thing as to commend or eulogize the fact. I am not saying that it is a fine and noble thing that whatever is immediately consummatory and precious should be also evanescent and unique, never completely subject to principle and rule. A reporter is not necessarily to blame for the state of thing that he reports. The fact hereby reported is so unescapable and so obvious to a candid empiricist that there is no occasion for either eulogy or condemnation. The only question is what is going to be done about the various instances of it which compose our lives, and give them humor and tragedy. The question is urgent for reflection; it is urgent for the most practical of acts in "getting a living," where the need to do something is constantly imperative. Materials used in reflection change even more rapidly than materials employed in meeting hunger and thirst. Their metabolism is at a quicker pace. Genuinely to think of a thing is to think of implications that are no sooner thought of than we are hurried on to their implications. There is no rest for the thinker, save in the process of thinking. Possibly it is for this reason that reflection upon the whole has been identified in human culture with onerous labor, with the sombre and melancholic. Reverie travels fast, but in reverie the labor of making connections taut and consistent is not involved. Only in circumstances as fortunate as those of ancient Greece does effort to understand become a rich and full delight, so that it may be conceived of not only as an end of nature, but as its end of ends, for the sake of which all else happens.
Participation in this consummatory activity has, however, been confined to a few. Since it was conceived of as an end given spontaneously or "naturally" to a few, not as a practical and reflective conclusion to be achieved, it was concluded that some men are servile by nature, having as sole function to supply the materials which made it possible for other men to indulge in pure theoretical activity, without distraction by the need of making a living. Thus the conception that thought is the final and complete end of nature became a "rationalization" of an existing division of classes in society. The division of men into the thoughtless and the inquiring was taken to be the intrinsic work of nature; in effect it was identical with the division between workers and those enjoying leisure. Philosophers and scientific inquiries became the utmost acme of nature's perfection, being the least dependent upon outward acts and connections.
In a sense, this occurrence of thought and leisurely insight was natural; it happened in the course of natural processes. It was "given." Like any finality it had to be hit upon, achieved without premeditation before it might become an object of reflective choice and endeavor. But when it came to be reflected upon, its terms were misconceived. The conception that contemplative thought is the end in itself was at once a compensation for inability to make reason effective in practice, and a means for perpetuating a division of social classes. A local and temporal polity of historical nature became a metaphysics of everlasting being. Thought when it achieves truth may, indeed, be said to fulfill the regularities and universalities of nature; to be their natural end. But its incarnation as an end in some, not others, does not partake of any universality. It is contingent, accidental; its achievement is a rational fulfillment only when it is the product of deliberate arts of politics and education.
Since nothing in nature is exclusively final, rationality is always means as well as end. The doctrine of the universality and necessity of rational ends can be validated only when those in whom the good is actualized employ it as a means to modify conditions so that others may also participate in it, and its universality exist in the course of affairs. The more it is asserted that thought and understanding are "ends in themselves," the more imperative is it that thought should discover why they are realized only in a small and exclusive class. The ulterior problem of thought is to make thought prevail in experience, not just the results of thought by imposing them upon others, but the active process of thinking. The ultimate contradiction in the classic and genteel tradition is that while it made thought universal and necessary and the culminating good of nature, it was content to leave its distribution among men a thing of accident, dependent upon birth, economic, and civil status. Consistent as well as humane thought will be aware of the hateful irony of a philosophy which is indifferent to the conditions that determine the occurrence of reason while it asserts the ultimacy and universality of reason. In as far as qualities of objects are found worthy of finality, the finding must eventuate in arts. Only thereby will thinking and knowing take their full place as events falling within natural processes, not only in their origin but also in their outcome.
1 To avoid misapprehension it should perhaps be explicitly stated the terra "efficacy" employed here and elsewhere, does not imply an interpretation in terms of the old theory of something engaged in emitting force. It is used purely denotatively; it designates empirical position in a course of affairs having a specifiable ending; its meaning is defined not by any theory, but by such affairs as that to get a fire, a match is applied and that it is applied not to a stone but to paper or shavings. The words agency, instrumentality, causal condition, which appear frequently in these pages are to be similarly translated.