No mythology is more familiar than that which tells how labor is due to trespass of man upon divine prerogatives, an act that brought curse upon the earth and woe to man. Because of this primeval rebellion against God, men toil amid thorns to gain an uncertain livelihood, and women bring forth children in pain. The tale is touching evidence that man finds it natural that nature should support his activities, and unnatural that the burden of continued and hard endeavor should be placed upon him. Festivity is spontaneous; labor needs to be accounted for. There is a long distance between the birth of the old legend and the formulation of classic political economy; but the doctrine of the latter that labor which is the source of value signifies cost, onerous sacrifice of present consummation to attainment of later good, expresses the same human attitude.
Yet, in fact, it was not enjoyment of the apple but the enforced penalty of labor that made man as the gods, knowing good and evil instead of just having and enjoying them. The exacting conditions imposed by nature, that have to be observed in order that work be carried through to success, are the source of all noting and recording of nature's doings. They supply the discipline that chastens exuberant fancy into respect for the operation of events, and that effect subjection of thought to a pertinent order of space and time. While leisure is the mother of drama, sport and literary spell-binding, necessity is the mother of invention, discovery and consecutive reflection. While at happy junctures the course of extraordinary events may be bound or wheedled by enjoyed rite and ceremony, only work places a conclusive spell upon homely, everyday affairs. Spears, snares, gins, traps, utensils, baskets and webs may have their potency enhanced by adherence to ceremonial design, but the design is never a complete substitute for conformity to the efficacious resistances and adaptations of natural materials. Acumen, shrewdness, inventiveness, accumulation and transmission of information are products of the necessity under which man labors to turn away from absorption in direct having and enjoying, so as to consider things in their active connections as means and as signs. The same need converts immediate emotion irrelevant to everything save its own thrill into ordered interest in the movements and possibilities of natural events. Everything is done to bedeck utilities, instrumentalities, with reminders of consummatory events so as to lessen their burden, but useful arts in return supply ceremonial arts with their materials, appliances and patterns.
Tools, means, agencies are the characteristic thing in industry; such a statement is tautology. By its nature technology is concerned with things and acts in their instrumentalities, not in their immediacies. Objects and events figure in work not as fulfillments, realizations, but in behalf of other things of which they are means and predictive signs. A tool is a particular thing, but it is more than a particular thing, since it is a thing in which a connection, a sequential bond of nature is embodied. It possesses an objective relation as its own defining property. Its perception as well as its actual use takes the mind to other things. The spear suggests the feast not directly but through the medium of other external things, such as the game and the hunt, to which the sight of the weapon transports imagination. Man's bias towards himself easily leads him to think of a tool solely in relation to himself, to his hand and eyes, but its primary relationship is toward other external things, as the hammer to the nail, and the plow to the soil. Only through this objective bond does it sustain relation to man himself and his activities. A tool denotes a perception and acknowledgment of sequential bonds in nature.
Classic philosophy was conceived in wonder, born in leisure and bred in consummatory contemplation. Hence it noted the distinction between objects consummatory or final in the fine arts and instrumental and operative in the industrial. It then employed the distinction to interpret nature in terms of a dialectical physics. Useful arts are possible because things have observable efficiencies; but they are necessary because of lack, privation, imperfection, Non-being. This deficiency is manifest in sensation and appetite; the very transitiveness of materials which renders them capable of transformation into serviceable forms is evidence that they too lack fullness of Being. Things have potentialities or are instrumental because they are not Being, but rather Being in process of becoming. They lend themselves to operative connections that fulfill them because they are not themselves Real in an adequate sense. This point of view protected Greek thought from that modern onesidedness which conceives tools as mere subjective conveniences. But the safeguard was at the expense of the introduction into nature of a split in Being itself, its division into some things which are inherently defective, changing, relational, and other things which are inherently perfect, permanent, self-possessed. Other dualisms such as that between sensuous appetite and rational thought, between the particular and universal, between the mechanical and the telic, between experience and science, between matter and mind, are but the reflections of this primary metaphysical dualism.
The counterpart of the conversion of esthetic objects into objects of science, into the one, true and good, was the conversion of operative and transitive objects into things which betray absence of full Being. This absence causes their changing instability which is, none the less, after the model of materials of the useful arts, potentially useful for ends beyond themselves. The social division into a laboring class and a leisure class, between industry and esthetic contemplation, became a metaphysical division into things which are mere means and things which are ends. Means are menial, subservient, slavish; and ends liberal and final; things as means testify to inherent defect, to dependence, while ends testify to independent and intrinsically self-sufficing being. Hence the former can never be known in themselves but only in their subordination to objects that are final, while the latter can be known in and through themselves by self-enclosed reason. Thus the identification of knowledge with esthetic contemplation and the exclusion from science of trial, work, manipulation and administration of things, comes full circle.
The ingratitude displayed by thinkers to artists who by creation of harmoniously composed objects supplied idealistic philosophy with empirical models of their ultimately real objects, was shown in even greater measure to artisans. The accumulated results of the observations and procedures of farmers, navigators, builders furnished matter-of-fact information about natural events, and also supplied the pattern of logical and metaphysical subordination of change to directly possessed and enjoyed fulfillments. While thinkers condemned the industrial class and despised labor, they borrowed from them the facts and the conceptions that gave form and substance to their own theories. For apart from processes of art there was no basis for introducing the idea of fulfillment, realization, into the notion of end nor for interpreting antecedent operations as potentialities.
Yet we should not in turn exhibit ingratitude. For if Greek thinkers did not achieve science, they achieved the idea of science. This accomplishment was beyond the reach of artist and artisan. For no matter how solid the content of their own observations and beliefs about natural events, that content was bound down to occasions of origin and use. The relations they recognized were of local areas in tune and place. Subject-matter underwent a certain distortion when it was lifted out of this context, and placed in a realm of eternal forms. But the idea of knowledge was thereby liberated, and the scheme of logical relationships among existences held up as an ideal of inquiry. Thinking was uncovered as an enter-prize having its own objects and procedures; and the discovery of thought as method of methods in all arts added a new dimension to all subsequent experience. It would be an academic matter to try to balance the credit items due to the discovery of thought and of logic as a free enterprise, against the debit consequences resulting from the hard and fast separation of the instrumental and final.
A great change took place in Greek experience between the time of Homer and Hesiod and the fifth century before Christ. The earlier period evinces a gloomy temper of life. The sense of the sovereignty of fortune, largely ill-fortune, is prevalent. The temper is shown by such quotations as the following: "Thus the gods have decided for unhappy mortals that men should live in misery while they themselves live free from suffering." "A thousand woes traverse the abode of man; the earth is gorged with them and the sea filled; day and night bring grief. They come in silence for prudent Zeus has taken away their voice." "Men favored by Hecate have no need for knowledge, memory or effort to achieve success; she acts alone without the assistance of her favorites." Divination of the intent of unseen powers and pious sacrifice are man's only resource, but this is of no avail. Reckon no man happy till after his death. The gods have indeed bestowed arts on man to ameliorate his hard lot, but their issue is uncertain. The ends rests with the gods and with fate who rules even the gods, a fate to be neither bribed with offerings nor yet compelled by knowledge and art.
By the days of the Sophists and their great Athenian successors there is marked change in mood. The conditions then existed that have occasioned the myth of Greek serenity. The Sophists taught that man could largely control the fortunes of life by mastery of the arts. No one has exceeded Plato in awareness of present ills. But since they are due to ignorance and opinion, they are remediable, he holds, by adequate knowledge. Philosophy should terminate in an art of social control. The great rival of Plato taught that fortune "is a fantom which men have invented to excuse their own imprudence. Fortune does not easily resist thought and for the most part an instructed and far-seeing soul will attain its goal." In short arts based on knowledge cooperate with nature and render it amenable to human happiness. The gods recede into twilight. Divination has a powerful competitor. Worship becomes moral. Medicine, war, and the crafts desert the temple and the altar of the patron-god of the guild, as inventions, tools, techniques of action and works multiply.
This period of confident expansion did not endure. It soon gave way; it was succeeded by what Gilbert Murray has so well named the failure of nerve, and a return to the supernatural, philosophy changing from a supreme art into a way of access to the supernatural. Yet the episode even if brief is more than historically significant. It manifests another way open to man in the midst of an uncertain, incomplete and precarious universe; another way, that is, in addition to that of celebrating such moments of respite and festal joy as occur in the troubled life of man. Through instrumental arts, arts of control based on study of nature, objects which are fulfilling and good, may be multiplied and rendered secure. This road after almost two millenia of obscuration and desertion was refound and retaken; its rediscovery marks what we call the modern era. Consideration of the significance of science as a resource in a world of mixed uncertainty, peril, and of uniformity, stability, furnishes us with the theme of this chapter of experience.
That the sciences were born of the arts, the physical sciences of the crafts and technologies of healing, navigation, war and the working of wood, metals, leather, flax and wool; the mental sciences of the arts of political management, is I suppose, an admitted fact. The distinctively intellectual attitude which marks scientific inquiry was generated in efforts at controlling persons and things so that consequences, issues, outcomes would be more stable and assured. The first step away from oppression by immediate things and events was taken when man employed tools and appliances, for manipulating things so as to render them contributory to desired objects. In responding to things not in their immediate qualities but for the sake of ulterior results, immediate qualities are dimmed, while those features which are signs, indices of something else, are distinguished. A thing is more significantly what it makes possible than what it immediately is. The very conception of cognitive meaning, intellectual significance, is that things in their immediacy are subordinated to what they portend and give evidence of. An intellectual sign denotes that a thing is not taken immediately but is referred to something that may come in consequence of it. Intellectual meanings may themselves be appropriated, enjoyed and appreciated; but the character of intellectual meaning is instrumental. Fortunate for us is it that tools and their using can be directly enjoyed; otherwise all work would be drudgery. But this additive fact does not alter the definition of a tool; it remains a thing used as an agency for some concluding event.
The first groping steps in defining spatial and temporal qualities, in transforming purely immediate qualities of local things into generic relationships, were taken through the arts. The finger, the foot, the unit of walking were used to measure space; measurements of weight originated in the arts of commercial exchange and manufacture. Geometry, beginning as agricultural art, further emancipated space from being a localized quality of immediate extensity. But the radically different ways of conceiving geometry found in ancient and in modern science is evidence of the slowness of the process of emancipation of even geometrical forms from direct or esthetic traits. In Greek astronomy the intrinsic qualities of figures always dominated their instrumental significance in inquiry; they were forms to which phenomena had to conform instead of means of indirect measurements. Hardly till our own day did spatial relations get emancipated from esthetic and moral qualities, and become wholly intellectual and relational, abstracted from immediate qualifications, and thereby generalized to their limit.
Anything approaching a history of the growth of recognition of things in their intellectual or instrumental phase is far beyond our present scope. We can only point out some of its net results. In principle the step is taken whenever objects are so reduced from their status of complete objects as to be treated as signs or indications of other objects. Enter upon this road and the time is sure to come when the appropriate object-of-knowledge is stripped of all that is immediate and qualitative, of all that is final, self-sufficient. Then it becomes an anatomized epitome of just and only those traits which are of indicative or instrumental import. Abstraction is not a psychological incident; it is a following to its logical conclusion of interest in those phases of natural existence which are dependable and fruitful signs of other things; which are means of prediction by formulation in terms implying other terms. Self-evidence ceases to be a characteristic trait of the fundamental objects of either sensory or noetic objects. Primary propositions are statements of objects in terms which procure the simplest and completest forming and checking of other propositions. Many systems of axioms and postulates are possible, the more the merrier, since new propositions as consequences are thus brought to light. Genuine science is impossible as long as the object esteemed for its own intrinsic qualities is taken as the object of knowledge. Its completeness, its immanent meaning, defeats its use as indicating and implying.
Said William James, "Many were the ideal prototypes of rational order: teleological and esthetic ties between things .... as well as logical and mathematical relations. The most promising of these things at first were of course the richer ones, the more sentimental ones. The baldest and least promising were mathematical ones; but the history of the latter's application is a history of steadily advancing successes, while that of the sentimentally richer ones is one of relative sterility and failure. Take those aspects of phenomena which interest you as a human being most .... and barren are all your results. Call the things of nature as much as you like by sentimental moral and esthetic names, no natural consequences follow from the naming. .... But when you give the things mathematical and mechanical names and call them so many solids in just such positions, describing just such paths with just such velocities, all is changed Your "things" realize the consequences of the names by which you classed them."1
A fair interpretation of these pregnant sentences is that as long as objects are viewed telically, as long as the objects of the truest knowledge, the most real forms of being, are thought of as ends, science does not advance. Objects are possessed and appreciated, but they are not known. To know, means that men have become willing to turn away from precious possessions; willing to let drop what they own, however precious, in behalf of a grasp of objects which they do not as yet own. Multiplied and secure ends depend upon letting go existent ends, reducing them to indicative and implying means. The great historic obstacle to science was unwillingness to make the surrender, lest moral, esthetic and religious objects suffer. To large groups of persons, the bald and dry objects of natural science are still objects of fear. The mechanical or mathematical-logical object presents itself as a rival of the ideal and final object. Then philosophy becomes a device for conserving "the spiritual values of the universe" by devices of interpretation which converts the material and mechanical into mind. By means of a dialectic of the implications of the possibility of knowledge, the physical is transformed into something mental, psychic-as if psychic existence were sure to be inherently more ideal than the physical.
The net result of the new scientific method was conception of nature as a mathematical-mechanical object. If modern philosophy, reflecting the tendencies of the new science, abolished final causes from nature, it was because concern with qualitative ends, already existing objects of possession and enjoyment, blocked inquiry, discovery and control, and ended in barren dialectical disputes about definitions and classifications. A candid mind can hardly deny that sensory qualities, colors, moist and dry, hard and soft, light and heavy are genuine natural ends. In them the potentialities of the body are brought into functioning, while the activity of the body thus achieved brings in turn to completion potentialities in nature outside of the body. Nevertheless the theory that final objects are the appropriate objects of knowledge, in assimilating knowledge to esthetic contemplation had fatal consequences for science. All natural phenomena had to be known in terms of qualities. Hot and cold, wet and dry, up and down, light and heavy were things to know with and by. They were essential forms, active principles of nature. But Galileo and his scientific and philosophical followers (like Descartes and Hobbes) reversed the method by asserting that these sensory forms are things to be known, challenges to inquiry, problems, not solutions nor terms of solution. The assertion was a general one; it necessitated search for objects of knowledge. Dependable material with which to know was found in a different realm of being; in spatial relations, positions, masses, mathematically denned, and in motion as change of space having direction and velocity. Qualities were no longer things to do with; they were things already done, effects, requiring to be known by statement and description in mathematical and mechanical relations. The only world which defines and describes and explains was a world of masses in motion, arranged in a system of Cartesian coordinates.
When we view experientially this change, what occurs is the kind of thing that happens in the useful arts when natural objects, like crude ores, are treated as materials for getting something else. Their character ceases to lie in their immediate qualities, in just what they are and as directly enjoyed. Their character is now representative; some pure metal, iron, copper, etc. is their essence, which may be extracted as their "true" nature, their "reality." To get at this reality many existent constituents have to be got rid of. From the standpoint of the object, pure metal, these things to be eliminated are "false," irrelevant and obstructive. They stand in the way, and in the existent thing those qualities are alone significant which indicate the ulterior objective and which offer means for attaining it.
Modern science represents a generalized recognition and adoption of the point of view of the useful arts, for it proceeds by employment of a similar operative technique of manipulation and reduction. Physical science would be impossible without the appliances and procedures of separation and combinations of the industrial arts. In useful arts, the consequence is increase of power, multiplication of ends appropriated and enjoyed, and an enlarged and varied flexibility and economy in means used to achieve ends. Metal can be put to thousands of uses, while the crude ore can only be beheld for whatever esthetic qualities it happens to present, or be hurled bodily at game or an enemy. Reduction of natural existences to the status of means thus presents nothing inherently adverse to possessed and appreciated ends, but rather renders the latter a more secure and extensive affair.
Why then has it been so often assumed in modern philosophy that the advance of physical science has created a serious metaphysical problem; namely, that of the relation of a mechanical world as the object of knowledge to ends; the reconciliation of antithetical worlds of description and appreciation? In empirical fact, the advance of mechanistic science has multiplied and diversified ends; has increased wants and satisfactions, and has multiplied and diversified the means of attaining them. Why the problem? There are two historical empirical reasons to be given in answer. In the first place, the Aristotelian metaphysics of potentiality and actuality, of objects consummatory of natural processes, was intricately entangled with an astronomy and physics which had become incredible. It was also entangled with doctrines and institutions in politics and economics which were fast getting out of relationship to current social needs. The simplest recourse was to treat the classic tradition as the Jonah of science and throw it bodily overboard. The method was imperious and impatient, but it served a need. By a single act it relieved scientific inquiries of notions that were hampering, even paralyzing investigation into nature and that were limiting new practices by outworn sanctions.
By itself alone, howover, this cause would hardly have created more than a passing historic episode. The reason that rendered the abandonment of any theory of natural ends something more than a gesture of impatient haste lies in the persistence of the classic theory of knowledge. Greek thought regarded possession, contemplation, as the essence of science, and thought of the latter as such a complete possession of reality as incorporates it with mind. The notion of knowledge as immediate possession of Being was retained when knowing as an actual affair radically altered. Even when science had come to include a method of experimental search and finding, it was still defined as insight into, grasp of, real being as such, in comparison with which other modes of experience are imperfect, confused and perverted. Hence a serious problem. If the proper object of science is a mathe-matico-mechanical world (as the achievements of science have proved to be the case) and if the object of science defines the true and perfect reality (as the perpetuation of the classic tradition asserted), then how can the objects of love, appreciation-whether sensory or ideal-and devotion be included within true reality?
Efforts to answer this question constitute a large part of the technical content of modern metaphysical thought. Given the premises, its import covers almost every thing from the problem of freedom, ideals and ideas to the relation of the physical and the mental. With respect to the latter, there is the causal problem of their existential relation; and there is the cognitive problem of how one order of existence can refer to the other in such a way as to know it. We are not concerned here with the voluminous literature and various (controversial and controverted) points of view that have emerged. It is pertinent, however, to recall the source of the problems; and to register the statement that without the underlying dubious assumption, we are not called upon to find solutions; they cease to be perplexities as soon as certain premises are surrendered. The premise which concerns us here is that science is grasp of reality in its final self-sufficing form. If the proper object of knowledge has the character appropriate to the subject matter of the useful arts, the problem in question evaporates. The objects of science, like the direct objects of the arts, are an order of relations which serve as tools to effect immediate havings and beings. Goods, objects with qualities of fulfillment are the natural fruition of the discovery and employment of means, when the connection of ends with a sequential order is determined. Immediate empirical things are just what they always were: endings of natural histories. Physical science does not set up another and rival realm of antithetical existence; it reveals the state or order upon which the occurrence of immediate and final qualities depends. It adds to casual having of ends an ability to regulate the date, place and manner of their emergence. Fundamentally, the assertion that this condition of ordered relationships is mathematic, mechanical, is tautology; that is, the meaning of anything which is such that perception and use of it enables us to regulate consequences or attain terminal qualities is a mathematical, mechanical-or if you please -logical order. If we did not discover those which we have found, we should have to find another, if deliberate planning and execution are to occur.
If science be perfect grasp, or envisagement of being, and if science terminate with a mathematico-mechanical world, then, in the second place, we have upon our hands the problems of reality and appearance. In ancient thought, the problem occurred in a simple form. There were higher and lower forms of knowledge; but all stages of knowledge were alike realizations of some level of Being, so that appearance in contrast with reality meant only a lower degree of Being, being imperfect or not fully actualized. In modern science, with its homogenous natural world, this contrast of perfect and defective Being is meaningless. It is a question of knowledge or error, not of differences of cognitive grasp in one to one correspondence with different levels of Being. In the ancient view, sensation and opinion are good forms of knowledge in their place; what they know, their place, is just an inferior grade of Being. To the modern mind, they are not knowledge of anything unless they are brought to agree with the deliverances of science. Is matter an appearance of mind as true reality? Or is the mental only an appearance of the physical as the final reality? Or are both of them appearances of some still more ultimate reality?
Such questions are as necessary as they are unanswerable, given the premise which defines knowledge as direct grasp and envisagement. They vanish if the proper objects of science are nature in its instrumental characters. Any immediate object then becomes for inquiry, as something to be known, an appearance. To call it "appearance" denotes a functional status, not a kind of existence. Any quality in its immediacy is doubly an appearance. In the first place it appears; it is evident, conspicuous, outstanding, it is, to recur to language already used, had. A thing appears in the sense in which a bright object appears in a dark room, while other things remain obscure, hidden. The affair is one of physical and physiological limits of vision and audition, etc. We see islands floating as it were upon the sea; we call them islands because of their apparent lack of continuity with the medium that immediately surrounds them. But they are projections of the very earth upon which we walk; the connecting links do not ordinarily appear; they are there, but are not had. The difference between the appearing and the unappearing is of immense practical and theoretical import, imposing upon us need for inference, which would not exist if things appeared to us in their full connections, instead of with sharply demarcated outlines due to limits of perceptibility. But the ground of the difference is as physical as that between solid, liquid and gas. The endings of organic events, seeing, hearing, etc. are for the time being, or immediately, endings of the history of all natural events. To re-establish a connection of histories within a longer course of events and a more inclusive state of affairs, requires delving, probing, and extension by artifice beyond the apparent. To link the things which are immediately and apparitionally had with one another by means of what is not immediately apparent and thus to create new historic successions with new initiations and new endings depends in turn upon the system of mathematical-mechanical systems which form the proper objects of science as such.
The empirical basis of the distinction between the apparent and the non-apparent thus lies in the need for inference. When we take the outstandingly evident as evidence, its status is subordinate to that of unperceived things. For the nonce, it is a way of establishing something more fundamental than it is itself with respect to the object of inquiry. If we conceive of the world of immediately apparent things as an emergence of peaks of mountains which are submerged except as to their peaks or endings, and as a world of initial climbings whose subsequent career emerges above the surface only here and there and by fits and starts; and if we give attention to the fact that any ability of control whatever depends upon ability to unite these disparate appearances into a serial history, and then give due attention to the fact that connection into a consecutive history can be effected only by means of a scheme of constant relationships (a condition met by the mathematical-logical-mechanical objects of physics), we shall have no difficulty in seeing why it is that the immediate things from which we start lend themselves to interpretation as signs or appearances of the objects of physics; while we also recognize that it is only with respect to the function of instituting connection that the objects of physics can be said to be more "real." In the total situation in which they function, they are means to weaving together otherwise disconnected beginnings and endings into a consecutive history. Underlying "reality" and surface "appearance" in this connection have a meaning fixed by the function of inquiry, not an intrinsic metaphysical meaning.
To treat therefore the object of science-which in effect is the object of physics-as a complete and self-sufficient object, the end of knowing, is to burden ourselves with an unnecessary and insoluble problem. It commits us on one side to a realm of immediately apparent things, the socalled perceptual order which is an order only by courtesy, and on the other to a realm of inferred and logically constructed real objects. These two realms are rivals of each other. If knowledge is possession or grasp, then there are two incompatible kinds of knowledge, one sensible, the other rational. Which is the genuine article and which the counterfeit? If we say sensible knowledge is the genuine, then we are committed to phenomenalism of a somewhat chaotic kind, unless we follow Berkeley and invoke deity to hold the immediate things together.
If we say rational knowledge is the genuine article, then true reality becomes the reality of materialism or of logical realism or of objective idealism, according to training and temperament. To follow the clues of experience is to see that the socalled sensible world is a world of immediate beginnings and endings; not at all an affair of cases of knowledge but a succession of qualitative events; while the socalled conceptual order is recognized to be the proper object of science, since it constitutes the scheme of constant relationships by means of which spare, scattered and casual events are bound together into a connected history. These emergent immediate events remain the beginning and the end of knowledge; but since their occurrence is one with their being sensibly, affectionally and appreciatively had, they are not themselves things known. That the qualities and characters of these immediate apparitions are tremendously modified when they are linked together by 'physical objects'- that is, by means of the mathematical-mechanical objects of physics-is a fact of the same nature as that a steel watch-spring is a modification of crude iron ore. The objects of physics subsist precisely in order to bring about this transformation-to change, that is, casual endings into fulfillments and conclusions of an ordered series, with the development of meaning therein involved.
Practically all epistemological discussion depends upon a sudden and unavowed shift to and fro from the universe of having to the universe of discourse. At the outset, ordinary empirical affairs, chairs, tables, stones, sticks, etc., are called physical objects-which is obviously a term of theoretical interpretation when it so applied, carrying within itself a complete metaphysical commitment. Then physical objects are denned as the objects of physics, which is, I suppose, the only correct mode of designation. But such objects are clearly very different things from the plants, lamps, chairs, thunder and lightning, rocks etc. that were first called physical objects. So another transformation phantasmagoria in the tableau is staged. The original "physical things," ordinary empirical objects, not being the objects of physics, are not physical at all but mental. Then comes the grand dissolving climax in which objects of physics are shown as themselves hanging from empirical objects now dressed up as mental, and hence as themselves mental.
Everything now being mental, and the term having lost its original contrasting or differential meaning, a new and different series of transformation scenes is exhibited. Immediate empirical things are resolved into hard sensory data, which are called the genuine physical things, while the objects of physical science are treated as are logical constructions; all that remains to constitute mental existence is images and feelings. It is not necessary to mention other permutations and combinations, familiar to the student of theories of the possibility of knowledge. The samples mentioned are illustrations of the sort of thing which happens when the having of immediate objects, whether sensible, affectional or ap-preciatoral, is treated as a mode of knowledge.
If objects which are colored, sonorous, tactile, gustatory, loved, hated, enjoyed, admired, which are attractive and repulsive, exciting, indifferent and depressive, in all their infinitely numerous modes, are beginnings and endings of complex natural affairs, and if physical ob-jscts (defined as objects of physical science) are constituted by a mathematical-mechanical order; then physical objects instead of involving us in the predicament of having to choose between opposing claimants to reality, have precisely the characters which they should have in order to serve effectively as means for securing and avoiding immediate objects. Four of these characters may be noted. First, immediate things come and go; events in the way of direct seeing, hearing, touching, liking, enjoying, and the rest of them are in rapid change; the subject-matter of each has a certain uniqueness, un-repeatedness. Spatial-temporal orders, capable of mathematical formulation are, by contrast, constant. They present stability, recurrence at its maximum, raised to the highest degree. Qualitative affairs like red and blue, although in themselves unlike, are subject to comparison in terms of objects of physics; on the basis of connection with orders of sequence, a qualitative spectrum or scale becomes a scheme of numerable variations of a common unit.
The second character of objects of science follows from this feature. The possibility of regulating the occurrence of any event depends upon the possibility of instituting substitutions. By means of the latter, a thing which is within grasp is used to stand for another thing which is not immediately had, or which is beyond control. The technique of equations and other functions characteristic of modern science is, taken generically, a method of thoroughgoing substitutions. It is a system of exchange and mutual conversion carried to its limit.' The cognitive result is the homogeneous natural world of modern science, in its contrast with the qualitatively heterogeneous world of ancient science; the latter being made up of things different in inherent kinds and in qualities of movement, such up and down, lateral and circular, and heterogeneous according to periods of time, such as earlier and later. These become amenable to transformations in virtue of reciprocal substitutions.
In the third place, objects of knowledge as means explain the importance attached to elements, or numerically discrete units. Control of beginnings and ends by means is possible only when the individual, the unique, is treated as a composite of parts, made by sequential differentiations and integrations.1 In its own integrity an immediate thing just exists as it exists; it stays or it passes; it is enjoyed or suffered. That is all that can be said. But when it is treated as the outcome of a complex convergence or coincidence of a large number of elementary independent variables, points, moments, numerical units, particles of mass and energy or more elementary space-times, (which in spite of their independence are capable of one to one correspondence with one another) the situation changes. The simples or elements are in effect the last pivots upon which regulation of conditions, turns; last, that is to say, as far as present appliances permit.
Preoccupation with elementary units is as marked in logic, biology, and psychology, as in physics and chemistry. Sometimes it seems to have resulted in taking merely dialectical entities for actual unitary elements; but that is not logically necessary. Such an outcome signifies only that the right units were not found. Serious objection holds when the instrumental character of the elements is forgotten; and they are treated as independent, ultimate; when they are treated as metaphysical finalities, insoluble epistemological problems result. Whatever are designated as elements, whether logical, mathematical, physical or mental, depend especially upon the existence of immediate, qualitatively integral objects. Search for elements starts with such empirical objects already possessed. Sensory data, whether they are designated psychic or physical, are thus not starting points; they are the products of analysis. Denial of the primary reality of immediate empirical objects logically terminates in an abrogation of the reality of elements; for sensory data, or sensa and sensibilia, are the residua of analysis of these primary things. Moreover every step of analysis depends upon continual reference to these empirical objects. Drop them from mental view for a moment and any clew in search for elements is lost. Unless macroscopic things are recognized, cells, electrons, logical elements become meaningless. The latter have meaning only as elements of. Since, for example, only propositions have implications, a proposition cannot be a mere conjunction of terms; terms having no implications, a proposition so formed would have no significance. Terms must have a significance and since that they have only in a proposition, they depend upon some prior unity. In similar fashion, a purely unitary physical element would have no efficacy; it could not act or be acted upon.
We quote from a psychiatric writer speaking of his own field, in dealing with a particular matter on its own merits. With reference to one stage in the development of the theory of mental disorders, Dr. Adolph Meyer said that "there was a quest for elements of mind and their immediate correlation with the latest discoveries in the structure of the brain. The centre theory and the cell and neuronic theory seemed obligatory standpoints. Today we have become shy of such a one-sided not suffi ciently functional materialism......There is always a place for elements, but there is certainly also a place for the large momentous facts of human life just as we find it The psychopathologist had to learn to do more than the so-called "elementalist," who always goes back to the elements and smallest units and then is apt to shirk the responsibility of making an attempt to solve the concrete problems of greater complexity. The psychiatrist has to study individuals and groups as wholes, as complex units, as the "you" or "he" or "she" or "they" we have to work with. We recognize that throughout nature we have to face the general principle of unit-formation, and the fact that new units need not be a mere sum of the component parts, but can be an actually new entity not wholly predictable from the component parts and known only through actual experience with the specific product."4
Lastly, the instrumental nature of objects of knowledge accounts for the central position of laws, relations. These are the formulations of the regularities upon which intellectual and other regulation of things as immediate apparitions depends. Variability of elements in mathematical science is specious; elements vary independently of one another, but not independently of a relation to others, the relation or law being the constancy among variations. It is a truism that mathematics is the method by which elements can be stated as terms in constant relations, and be subjected to equations and other functions of transformation and substitution. An element is appropriately represented by a mathematical variable; for since any variable falls within some equation, it Is treated as a constant function of other variables. The shift from variability to constancy is repeated as often as is needed. It is thus only pro forma that the variable is variable. It is not variable in the sense in which unique individualized existences are variable. The inevitable consequence is the subjection of individuals or unique modes of variation to external relations, to laws of uniformity; that is to say, the elimination of individuality. Bear in mind the instrumental nature of the relation of elements, and this abrogation of individuality merely means a temporary neglect-an abstracted gaze-in behalf of attending to conditions under which individualities present themselves. Convert the objects of knowledge into real things by themselves, and individuals become anomalous or unreal; they are not individualized for science but are instances, cases, specimens, of some generical relation or law.
The difficulty under which morals labor in this case is evident. They can be "saved" only by the supposition of another kind of Being from that with which natural sciences are concerned. History and anthropology are implicated in a similar predicament. The former has for subject-matter not only individual persons but un-duplicated situations and events. The attempt to escape the dilemma by recourse to uniform and unilinear laws of sequence or "evolution" is inept; it contradicts the premises assumed, and is not borne out by facts. Contemporary anthropologists have made clear the historical nature of the phenomena with which they deal. Cultures are in many respects individual or unique, and their manifestations are "explained" by correlations with one another and by borrowings due to chance contacts. The chief, even if not sole, law of their changes is that of transmission from other individualized cultures.
It is no wonder that Historismus has become the preoccupying problem of a whole school of thinkers, many of whom now hold that the only attitude which can be taken toward historic situations and characters is non-intellectual, being esthetic appreciation, or sympathetic artistic rehabilitation. The theory which identifies knowledge with the beholding or grasp of self-sufficient objects reaches an impasse where it comes to deal with historical science in contrast with physics. Windelband justly draws the conclusion that Being and knowledge compel "antinomianism," certain problems inevitably force themselves upon us, but all efforts at solution are hopeless.6
Empirically, individualized objects, unique affairs, exist. But they are evanescent, unstable. They tremble on the verge of disappearance as soon as they appear. Useful arts prove that, within limits, neglect of their uniqueness and attention to what is common, recurrent, irrelevant to time, procures and perpetuates the happening of some of these unique things. Timeless laws, taken by themselves, like all universals, express dialectic intent, not any matter of fact existence. But their ultimate implication is application; they are methods, and when applied as methods they regulate the precarious flow of unique situations. Objects of natural science are not metaphysical rivals of historical events; they are means of directing the latter. Events change; one individual gives place to another. But individually qualified things have some qualities which are pervasive, common, stable. They are out of time in the sense that a particular temporal quality is irrelevant to them. If anybody feels relieved by calling them eternal, let them be called eternal. But let not "eternal" be then conceived as a kind of absolute perduring existence or Being. It denotes just what it denotes: irrelevance to existence in its temporal quality. These non-temporal, mathematical or logical qualities are capable of abstraction, and of conversion into relations, into temporal, numerical and spatial order.6 As such they are dialectical, non-existential. But also as such they are tools, instrumentalities applicable historic events to help regulate their course.
This entire discussion has but a single point. It aims to show that the problems which constitute modern epistemology with its rival, materialistic, spiritualistic, dualistic doctrines, and rival realistic, idealistic, representational theories; and rival doctrines of relation of mind and matter occasionalism, pre-established harmony, para-lellism, panpsychism, etc., have a single origin in the dogma which denies temporal quality to reality as such. Such a theory is bound to regard things which are causally explanatory as superior to results and outcomes; for the temporal dependence of the latter cannot be disguised, while "causes" can be plausibly converted into independent beings, or laws, or other non-temporal forms. As has been pointed out, this denial of change to true Being had its source in bias in favor of objects of contemplative enjoyment, together with a theory that such objects are the adequate subject-matter of science.
The bias is spontaneous and legitimate. The accompanying theory of knowledge and reality is a distortion. The legitimate implication of the preference for worthy objects of appreciation is the necessity of art, or control of the sequential order upon which they depend; a necessity which carries with it the further implication that this order, which is to be discovered by inquiry and confirmed by experimental action, is the proper object of knowledge. Such a recognition would, however, have conceded the dependence of the contemplative functions of the leisure class upon the appliances and technique of artisans- among whom all artists were included. And since in olden time the practice of the arts was largely routine, fixed by custom and ready-made patterns, such a recognition would have carried with it the need of transforming the arts themselves, if the occurrence of ends was to be a real fulfillment, a realization, and not a contingent accident. The introduction of inventive thought into the arts and the civil emancipation of the industrial class at last made the transformation possible.
When the appliances of a technology that had grown more deliberate were adopted in inquiry, and the lens, pendulum, magnetic needle, lever were used as tools of knowing, and their functions were treated as models to follow hi interpreting physical phenomena, science ceased to be identified with appreciative contemplation of noble and ideal objects, was freed from subjection to esthetic perfections, and became an affair of tune and history intelligently managed. Ends were in consequence no longer determined by physical accident and social traditions. Anything whatsoever for which means could be found was an end to be averted or to be secured. Liberation from a fixed scheme of ends made modern science possible. In large affairs, practice precedes the possibility of observation and formulation; the results of practice must accumulate before mind has anything to observe. There is little cause for wonder therefore that long after the objects of science had become instrumentalities rather than things in their own rights, the old theory persisted, and philosophy spent much of its effort in the effort to reconcile the traditional theory of knowledge as immediate possession with the terms and conclusions of the new method of practice.
It is characteristic of the inevitable moral pre-posses-sion of philosophy, together with the subjective turn of modern thought, that many critics take an "instrumental" theory of knowledge to signify that the value of knowing is instrumental to the knower. This is a matter which is as it may be in particular cases; but certainly in many cases the pursuit of science is sport, carried on, like other sports, for its own satisfaction. But "instrumentalism" is a theory not about personal disposition and satisfaction in knowing, but about the proper objects of science, what is "proper" being defined in terms of physics.
The distinction between tools (or things in their objectivities) and fulfilled products of the use of tools accounts for the distinction between known objects on one side and objects of appreciation and affection on the other. But the distinction primarily concerns objects themselves; only secondarily does it apply to attitudes, dispositions, motivations. Making and using tools may be intrinsically delightful. Prior to the introduction of machinery for quantitative production and sale of commodities for profit, utensils were themselves usually works of art, esthetically satisfying. This fact does not however define them as utensils; it does not confer upon them their characteristic property. In like manner, the pursuit of knowledge is often an immediately delightful event; its attained products possess esthetic qualities of proportion, order, and symmetry. But these qualities do not mark off or define the characteristic and appropriate objects of science. The character of the object is like that of a tool, say a lever; it is an order of determination of sequential changes terminating in a foreseen consequence.
We are brought to the question of method. In ancient science the essence of science was demonstration; the life blood of modern science is discovery. In the former, reflective inquiry existed for the sake of attaining a stable subject-matter; in the latter systematized knowledge exists in practice for the sake of stimulating, guiding and checking further inquiries. In ancient science, "learning" belonged in the realm of inferior being, of becoming, change; it was transitive, and ceased in the actualization of final and fixed objects. It was thought of after the analogy of master and disciple; the former was already in possession of the truth, and the learner merely appropriated what already is there in the store house of the master. In modern science, learning is finding out what nobody has previously known. It is a transaction in which nature is teacher, and in which the teacher comes to knowledge and truth only through the learning of the inquiring student.
Characteristic differences in logic thus accompany the change from "knowledge" whose subject-matter is final affairs to knowledge dealing with instrumental objects. Where the objects of knowledge are taken to be final, perfect, complete, metaphysical fulfillments of nature, proper method consists in definition and classification; learning closes with demonstration of the rational necessity of definitions and classifications. Demonstration is an exhibition of the everlasting, universal, final and fixed nature of objects. Investigation denoted merely the accumulation of material with which to fill in gaps in an antecedent ready-made hierarchy of species. Discovery was merely the perception that some particular material hitherto unclassified by the learner came under a universal form already known. The universal is already known because given to thought; and the particular is already known, because given to perception; learning merely brings these two given forms into connection, so that what is "discovered" is the subsumption of particular under its universal.
Apart from their theories, or in spite of them, the Greeks were possessed by a lively curiosity, and their practice was better than their logic. In the medieval Christian period, the logic was taken literally. Revelation, scriptures, church fathers and other authentic sources, increased the number of given universal truths, and also of given particular facts and events. The master-teacher was God, who taught not through the dim instrumentality of rational thought alone, but directly through official representatives. The form of apprehension of truth remained the demonstrative syllogism; the store of universal truths was supplemented by the gracious gift of revelation, and the resources of the minor premise extended by divinely established historic facts. Truth was given to reason and faith; and the part of the human mind was to humble itself to hearken, accept and obey.
The scheme was logically complete; it carried out under new circumstances the old idea that the highest end and good of man is knowledge of true Being, and that such knowledge in the degree of its possession effects an assimilation of the mind to the reality known. It added to old theoretical premises such institutions and practices as were practically required to give them effect, so that the humblest of human creatures might at least start on the road to that knowledge the possession of which is salvation and bliss. In comparison, most modern theories are an inconsistent mixture; dialectically the modernist is easy prey to the traditionalist; he carries so many of the conceptions of the latter in his intellectual outfit that he is readily confuted. It is his practice not his theory that gets him ahead. His professed logic is still largely that of antecedent truths, demonstration and certitude; his practice is doubting, forming hypotheses, conducting experiments. When he surrenders antecedent truths of reason it is usually only to accept antecedent truths of sensation. Thus John StuartMill conceivesof aninductive logic in which certain canons shall bear exactly the same relation to inquiry into fact that the rules of the syllogism bore to classic "deductive" proof or dialectic. He recognizes that science is a matter of inference, but he is as certain as was Aristotle that inference rests upon certain truths which are immediately possessed, differing only about the organ through which they come into our possession.
But in the practice of science, knowledge is an affair of making sure, not of grasping antecedently given sureties. What is already known, what is accepted as truth, is of immense importance; inquiry could not proceed a step without it. But it is held subject to use, and is at the mercy of the discoveries which it makes possible. It has to be adjusted to the latter and not the latter to it. When things are defined as instruments, their value and validity reside in what proceeds from them; consequences not antecedents supply meaning and verity. Truths already possessed may have practical or moral certainty, but logically they never lose a hypothetic quality. They are true if: if certain other things eventually present themselves; and when these latter things occur they in turn suggest further possibilities; the operation of doubt-inquiry-finding recurs. Although science is concerned in practice with the contingent and its method is that of making hypotheses which are then tried out in actual experimental change of physical conditions, its traditional formulation persists in terms of necessary and fixed objects. Hence all kinds of incoherences occur. The more stubbornly the traditional formulation is clung to, the more serious become these inconsistencies.
Leonardo virtually announced the birth of the method of modern science when he said that true knowledge begins with opinion. The saying involves a revolution; no other statement could be so shocking to the traditional logic. Not that opinion as such is anything more than opinion or an unconfirmed and unwarranted surmise; but that such surmises may be used; when employed as hypotheses they induce experimentation. They then become fore-runners of truth, and mind is released from captivity to antecedent beliefs. Opinion, in the classic conception, was concerned with what was inherently contingent and variable as to possibility and probability, in contrast with knowledge concerned with the inherently necessary and everlasting. It therefore was as ultimate and unquestionable in its proper sphere as science was in its place. But opinion as a venture, as an "it seems to me probable," is an occasion of new observations, an instigator of research, an indispensable organ in deliberate discovery. Taken in this fashion, opinion was the source of new histories, the beginning of operations that terminated in new conclusions. Its worth lay neither in itself nor in a peculiar realm of objects to which it was applied, but in the direction of inquiries which it set agoing. It was a starting point, and like any beginning of any history was altered and displaced in the history of which it was the initiation.
Sometimes discovery is treated as a proof of the opposite of which it actually shows. It is viewed as evidence that the object of knowledge is already there in full-fledged being and that we just run across it; we uncover it as treasure-hunters find a chest of buried gold. That there is existence antecedent to search and discovery is of course admitted; but it is denied that as such, as other than the conclusion of the historical event of inquiry in its connection with other histories, it is already the object of knowledge. The Norsemen are said to have discovered America. But in what sense? They landed on its shores after a stormy voyage; there was discovery in the sense of hitting upon a land hitherto untrod by Europeans. But unless the newly found and seen object was used to modify old beliefs, to change the sense of the old map of the earth, there was no discovery in any pregnant intellectual sense, any more than mere stumbling over a chair in the dark is discovery till used as basis of inference which connects the stumbling with a body of meanings. Discovery of America involved insertion of the newly touched land in a map of the globe. This insertion, moreover, was not merely additive, but transformative of a prior picture of the world as to its surfaces and their arrangements. It may be replied that it was not the world which was changed but only the map. To which there is the obvious retort that after all the map is part of the world, not something outside it, and that its meaning and bearings are so important that a change in the map involves other and still more important objective changes.
It was not simply states of consciousness or ideas inside the heads of men that were altered when America was actually discovered; the modification was one in the public meaning of the world hi which men publicly act. To cut off this meaning from the world is to leave us in a situation where it makes no difference what change takes place in the world; one wave more or less in a puddle is of no account. Changing the meaning of the world effected an existential change. The map of the world is something more than a piece of linen hung on a wall. A new world does not appear without profound transformations in the old one; a discovered America was a factor interacting with Europe and Asia to produce consequences previously impossible. A potential object of further exploration and discoveries now existed in Europe itself; a source of gold; an opportunity for adventure; an outlet for crowded and depressed populations, an abode for exiles and the discounted, an appeal to energy and invention: in short, an agency of new events and fruitions, at home as well as abroad. In some degree, every genuine discovery creates some such transformation of both the meanings and the existences of nature.
Modern idealistic theories of knowledge have displayed some sense of the method and objective of science. They have apprehended the fact that the object of knowledge implies that the found rather than the given is the proper subject matter of science. Recognizing the part played by intelligence in this finding, they have framed a theory of the constitutive operation of mind in the determination of real objects. But idealism, while it has had an intimation of the constructively instrumental office of intelligence, has mistranslated the discovery. Following the old tradition, in its exclusive identification of the object of knowledge with reality, equating truth and Being, it was forced to take the work of thought absolutely and wholesale, instead of relatively and in detail. That is, it took re-constitution to be constitution; re-construction to be construction. Accepting the premise of the equivalence of Reality with the attained object of knowledge, idealism had no way of noting that thought is intermediary between some empirical objects and others. Hence an office of transformation was converted into an act of original and final creation. A conversion of actual immediate objects into better, into more secure and significant, objects was treated as a movement from merely apparent and pheno-mental Being to the truly Real. In short, idealism is guilty of neglect that thought and knowledge are histories.
To call action of thought in constituting objects direct is the same as to say that it is miraculous. For it is not thought as idealism defines thought which exercises the reconstructive function. Only action, interaction, can change or remake objects. The analogy of the skilled artist still holds. His intelligence is a factor in forming new objects which mark a fulfillment. But this is because intelligence is incarnate in overt action, using things as means to affect other things. "Thought," reason, intelligence, whatever word we choose to use, is existentially an adjective (or better an adverb), not a noun. It is disposition of activity, a quality of that conduct which foresees consequences of existing events, and which uses what is foreseen as a plan and method of administering affairs.
This theory, explicitly about thought as a condition of science, is actually a theory about nature. It involves attribution to nature of three denning characteristics. In the first place, it is implied that some natural events are endings whether enjoyed or obnoxious, which occur, apart from reflective choice and art, only casually, without control. In the second place, it implies that events, being events and not rigid and lumpy substances, are ongoing and hence as such unfinished, incomplete, indeterminate. Consequently they possess a possibility of being so managed and steered that ends may become fulfilments not just termini, conclusions not just closings. Suspense, doubt, hypotheses, experiment with alternatives are exponents of this phase of nature. In the third place, regulation of ongoing and incomplete processes in behalf of selected consequences, implies that there are orders of sequence and coexistence involved; these orders or relations when ascertained are intellectual means which enable us to use events as concrete means of directing the course of affairs to forecast conclusions. The belief that these orders of relation, which are the appropriate object of science, are therefore the sole ultimately "real" objects is the source of that assertion of a symmetrical dovetailed and completed universe made by both traditional materialism and idealism. The belief is due to neglect of the fact that such relations are always relations of ongoing affairs characterized by beginnings and endings which mark them off into unstable individuals. Yet this neglected factor is empirically so pervasive and conspicuous that it has to be acknowledged in some form; it is usually acknowledged in a backhanded way-and one which confuses subsequent reflection-by attributing all qualities inconsistent with nature thus defined to "finite" mind, in order to account for ignorance, doubt, error and the need of inference and inquiry.
If nature is as finished as these schools have denned it to be, there is no room or occasion in it for such a mind; it and the traits it is said to possess are literally supernatural or at least extra-natural.
A realist may deny this particular hypothesis that, cxistentially, mind designates an instrumental method of directing natural changes. But he cannot do so in virtue of his realism; the question at issue is what the real is. If natural existence is qualitatively individualized or genuinely plural, as well as repetitious, and if things have both temporal quality and recurrence or uniformity, then the more realistic knowledge is, the more fully it will reflect and exemplify these traits. Science seizes upon whatever is so uniform as to make the changes of nature rhythmic, and hence predictable. But the contingencies of nature make discovery of these uniformities with a view to prediction needed and possible. Without the uniformities, science would be impossible. But if they alone existed, thought and knowledge would be impossible and meaningless. The incomplete and uncertain gives point and application to ascertainment of regular relations and orders. These relations in themselves are hypothetical, and when isolated from application are subject-matter of mathematics (in a non-existential sense). Hence the ultimate objects of science are guided processes of change.
Sometimes the use of the word "truth" is confined to designating a logical property of propositions; but if we extend its significance to designate character of existential reference, this is the meaning of truth: processes of change so directed that they achieve an intended consummation. Instrumentalities are actually such only-in operation; when they operate, an end hi-view is in process of actualization. The means is fully a means only in its end. The instrumental objects of science are completely themselves only as they direct the changes of nature toward a fulfilling object. Thus it may be said intelligibly and not as mere tautology that the end of science is knowledge, implying that knowledge is more than science, being its fruit.
Knowledge is a word of various meanings. Etymologi-cally, "science" may signify tested and authentic instance of knowledge. But knowledge has also a meaning more liberal and more humane. It signifies events understood, events so discriminately penetrated by thought that mind is literally at home in them. It means comprehension, or inclusive reasonable agreement. What is sometimes termed "applied" science, may then be more truly science than is what is conventionally called pure science. For it is directly concerned with not just instrumentalities, but instrumentalities at work in effecting modifications of existence in behalf of conclusions that are reflectively preferred. Thus conceived the characteristic subject-matter of knowledge consists of fulfilling objects, which as fulfillments are connected with a history to which they give character. Thus conceived, knowledge exists in engineering, medicine and the social arts more adequately than it does in mathematics) and physics. Thus conceived, history and anthropology are scientific in a sense in which bodies of information that stop short with general formulae are not.
"Application" is a hard word for many to accept. It suggests some extraneous tool ready-made and complete, which is then put to uses that are external to its nature. To call the arts applications of science is then to introduce something foreign to the sciences which the latter irrelevantly and accidentally serve. Since the application is in human use, convenience, enjoyment and improvement, this view of application as something external and arbitrary reflects and strengthens the theories which detach man from nature, which, in the language of philosophy, oppose subject and object. But if we free ourselves from preconceptions, application of "science" means application in, not application to. Application in something signifies a more extensive interaction of natural events with one another, an elimination of distance and obstacles; provision of opportunities for interactions that reveal potentialities previously hidden and that bring into existence new histories with new initiations and endings. Engineering, medicine, social arts realize relationships that were unrealized in actual existences. Surely in their new context the latter are understood or known as they are not in isolation. Prejudice against the abstract, as something remote and technical, is often irrational; but there is sense in the conviction that in the abstract there is something lacking wfyich should be recovered. The serious objection to "applied" science lies in limitation of the application, as to private profit and class advantage.
"Pure" science is of necessity relational and abstract: it fulfills its meaning and gains full truth when included within a course of concrete events. The proposition that "pure" science is non-existential is a tacit admission that only "applied" science is existential. Something else than history and anthropology lose all scientific standing when standards of "purity" are set up as ultimate; namely, all science of existential events. There is superstitious awe reflected in the current estimate of science. If we could free ourselves from a somewhat abject emotion, it would be clear enough that what makes any proposition scientific is its power to yield understanding, insight, intellectual at-homeness, in connection with any existential state of affairs, by filling events with coherent and tested meanings. The case of history is typical and basic. Upon the current view, it is a waste of time to discuss whether there can be such a thing as a science of history. History and science are by definition at opposite poles. And yet if all natural existences are histories, divorce between history and the logical mathematical schemes which are the appropriate objects of pure science, terminates in the conclusion that of existences there is no science, no adequate knowledge. Aside from mathematics, all knowledge is historic; chemistry, geology, physiology, as well as anthropology and those human events to which, arrogantly, we usually restrict the title of history. Only as science is seen to be fulfilled and brought to itself in intelligent management of historical processes in their continuity can man be envisaged as within nature, and not as a supernatural extrapolation. Just because nature is what it is, history is capable of being more truly known - understood, intellectually realized-than are mathematical and physical objects. Do what we can, there always remains something recondite and remote in the latter, until they are restored in the course of affairs from which they have been sequestrated. While the humanizing of science contributes to the life of humanity, it is even more required in behalf of science, in order that it may be intelligible, simple and clear; in order that it may have that correspondence with reality which true knowledge claims for itself.
One can understand the sentiment that animates the bias of scientific inquirers against the idea that all science is ultimately applied. It is justified in the sense in which it is intended; for it is directed against two conceptions which are harmful, but which, also, are irrelevant to the position here taken. One of these conceptions is that the concern or personal motive of the inquirer should be in each particular inquiry some specific practical application. This is just as it happens to be. Doubtless many important scientific discoveries have been thus instigated, but that is an incident of human history rather than of scientific inquiry as such. And upon the whole, or if this animating interest were to become general, the undoubted effect is limitation of inquiry and thereby in the end of the field of application. It marks a recurrence to the dogma of fixed predetermined ends, while emancipation from the influence of this dogma has been the chief service rendered modern scientific methods.
The evil thus effected is increased by the second notion, namely, that application isidentical with "commercialized" use. It is an incident of human history, and a rather appalling incident, that applied science has been so largely made an equivalent of use for private and economic class purposes and privileges. When inquiry is narrowed by such motivation or interest, the consequence is in so far disastrous both to science and to human life. But this limitation does not spring from nor attach to the conception of "application" which has been just presented. It springs from defects and perversions of morality as that is embodied in institutions and their effects upon personal disposition. It may be questioned whether the notion that science is pure in the sense of being concerned exclusively with a realm of objects detached from human concerns has not conspired to reinforce this moral deficiency. For in effect it has established another class-interest, that of intellectualists and aloof specialists. And it is of the nature of any class-interest to generate and confirm other class-interests, since division and isolation in a world of continuities are always reciprocal. The institution of an interest labelled ideal and idealistic in isolation tends of necessity to evoke and strengthen other interests lacking ideal quality. The genuine interests of "pure" science are served only by broadening the idea of application to include all phases of liberation and enrichment of human experience.
1 James, Principles of Psychology, Vol. II, pp. 605-06.
1 The modern mathematical conception of infinity as correspondence of part and whole appears to represent this function in its generalized form.
* Leibniz, whose monadism is the first philosophical manifestation of this notion, and the prototype of analytic realism, or theory of external relations, asserted the existence of monads on the ground that every composite implies elements. Surely. But he omitted to note that metaphysically the case was begged as soon as an affair, no matter how elaborate in structure, is regarded as being composite. To be a composite is one thing; to be capable of reduction to a composite by certain measures, is another thing.
4 Adolph Meyer, A Psychiatric Milestone, p. 32. P. 38.
6 "It remains an unsolved problem why timeless reality needs realization in the temporal course of the event or why it tolerates in itself an event in the temporal course of which there is something that differs from its own nature. We do not understand why that which is also has nevertheless to happen; and still less why something different happens from that which is in itself without time." Introduction tr Philosophy, English translation, p. 299.
6 For a convincing discussion see Brown's essay, Intelligence and Mathematics, in the volume, Creative Intelligence, especially the section entitled Things, Relations, and Quantities. "Instead of reducing qualities to relations, it seems to me a much more intelligible view to conceive relations as abstract ways of taking qualities in general, as qualities thought of in their function of bridging a gap or making a transition between two bits of reality that have previously been taken as separate things." P. 159. Thus "terms, (elements) and relations are both (p. 160) abstract replacements of qualitatively heterogeneous realities of such a sort as "to symbolize their effective nature in particular respect." The word "effective" brings out the agreement of the text with this point of view, for which I am much indebted to Dr. Brown.