Personality, selfhood, subjectivity are eventual functions that emerge with complexly organized interactions, organic and social. Personal individuality has its basis and conditions in simpler events. Plants and non-human animals act as if they were concerned that their activity, their characteristic receptivity and response, should maintain itself. Even atoms and molecules show a selective bias in their indifferencies, affinities and repulsions when exposed to other events. With respect to some things they are hungry to the point of greediness; in the presence of others they are sluggish and cold. It is not surprising that naive science imputed appetition to their own consummatory outcome to all natural processes, and that Spinoza identified inertia and momentum with inherent tendency on the part of things to conserve themselves in being, and achieve such perfection as belongs to them. In a genuine although not psychic sense, natural beings exhibit preference and centeredness.
In regard to the nature of the individual, as in so many other respects, classic and modern philosophies have pursued opposite paths. In Greek reflection, love of perfection, or self-completion, was attributed to Being. The state of self-sufficiency excluding deficiency constituted the individual, significant change being thought of as the coming into being of such a whole. In consequence, in view of the obvious instability of particular existences such as moderns usually term individuals, a species immutable in time and having form was the true individual. What moderns call individuals were particulars, transient, partial, and imperfect specimens of tKe true individual. Mankind as species is more truly an individual than was this or that man. Although Aristotle criticized his master for giving Being to the genus or universal separate from particulars, he never doubted that the species was a real entity, a metaphysical or existential whole including and characterizing all particulars. A type-form had no separate being; but, being embodied in particulars, it made them an intrinsically unified and marked out class, which as a class was ungenerated and indestructible, perfect and complete.
Modern science has made the conception strange. Yet it was a natural interpretation of things found in ordinary experience. The immediate qualitative differences of things cannot be recognized without noting that things possessed of these qualitative traits fall into kinds, or families. That the family is more lasting, important, and real than any of its members; that the family confers upon its constituents their standing and character, so that those who have no family are outcasts and wanderers, represents a notable situation in most forms of human culture. In such a cultural scheme, those peculiar differences that constitute for us personal individuality are only accidental variations from the family type, the form which marks a kind enables a particular person to be placed, known, identified. The modern habit of using self, "I," mind, and spirit interchangeably is inconceivable when family and commune are solid realities. To the Greeks, a kind was an organized system in which an ideal form unites varying particulars into a genuine whole, and gives to them distinctive and recognizable character. The presence in things of the generic form renders them knowable. Mind is but the ordered system of all the characters which constitute kinds, differing among men, differing according to differences of organic constitutions. Upon such a view, subjectivity, individuality of mind marks an anomaly; a failure of realization of objective forms on the part of the indwelling family to impress itself adequately, owing to stubborn resisting material constitution. What is prized and exalted by moderns as individual was just the defect which is the source of ignorance, opinion, and error.
Such a marked difference in the estimate of the status of individuality is proof of difference in the empirical content of ancient and modern culture. In primitive cultures, experience is dominated by what a contemporary French school has called categories of participation and incorporation. Life and being belong in a significant sense to the tribe and family; particular creatures are only members of a consolidated whole. This state of social affairs formed the pattern in accord with which all natural events were construed. One need not endorse all the details of the theories of this French school or even accept its general principles, in order to recognize a predominantly collectivistic character in early culture, and to perceive its influence upon early beliefs and modes of thought. An individual was a member of a group-whole; in this membership were almost exhausted his accomplishments and possibilities. From birth, he was a subject for assimilation and incorporation of group traditions and customs; his personal measure was the extent in which he became their vehicle. Private belief and invention, were a deviation, a dangerous eccentricity, signs of disloyal disposition. The private was an equivalent of the illicit; and all innovations and departures from custom are illicit:-witness the fact that children have to be educated and inducted into tradition and custom. This need of education, moreover, and of maintenance of tradition against deviation serve to bring otherwise unconscious customs to mind, and to render consciousness of them acute and emotional.1 Thereby, customs are more than mere overt ways of action; tradition is more than external imitation and reproduction of what obtains in outward behavior. Custom is Nomos, lord and king of all, of emotions, beliefs, opinions, thoughts as well as deeds.
Yet mind in an individualized mode has occasionally some constructive operation. Every invention, every improvement in art, technological, military and political, has its genesis in the observation and ingenuity of a particular innovator. All utensils, traps, tools, weapons, stories, prove that some one exercised at sometime initiative in deviating from customary models and standards. Accident played its part; but some one had to observe and utilize the accidental change before a new tool and custom emerged. Men were not wholly and merely subdued to the demands of custom, even when innovations were looked upon as threats to the welfare of the group, defiances of its gods.
As Goldenweiser has said: "Whether it is a pot, basket or blanket that is being manufactured, or the soil that is being tilled, or an animal that is being hunted or fought-in all of these situations man faces an individual, technical task. In all of these directions there is room for the development and exhibition of skill. In industry and the chase, in a sea-faring expedition and a war raid, things can be done well and less well There is opportunity for comparison of individual efforts, there is rivalry."2 As a fruit of this rivalry of individuals, pace-making occurs; those who excel set a standard for others to come up to; they furnish models of technique to be adopted by others, till gradually or suddenly they initiate a new custom. Even in cultures most committed to reproduction, there is always occurring some creative production, through specific variations, that is, through individuals. Thus, while negatively individuality means something to be subdued, positively it denotes the source of change in institutions and customs. While the negative side is most conscious and most asserted, the positive phase is there and is taken advantage of, even though by stealth and under cover. Upon the whole the imagination and effort of individual technicians and artists were submerged; in idea, the doctrine of fixed wholes with their fixed patterns prevailed. We may well follow the further statements of Dr. Goldenweiser. "When tradition is a matter of the spoken word, the advantage is all on the side of age. The elder is in the saddle;" because he is the most experienced man and the one who best embodies the net experience of the group. The group is small enough to be homogeneous; innovations are conspicuous and focus resentment; customary activities are moreover enmeshed in ceremonialism and have supernatural sanctions; variations when once they are adopted become automatic group habits; they endure not as ideas or because of insight into principles, but as "motor habits which represent nothing but knowledge and technical experience rendered mechanical through habituation;" individual "consciousness and ratiocination quickly are incorporated in objective results which are handed down while the thinking perishes; inventions become part of the technical equipment of behavior, not of thought and understanding." Under such circumstances, individual variations of thought remain private reveries or are soon translated into objective established institutions through gradual accumulation of imperceptible variations. The exceptional character of creative individuality is reflected in attribution of the origin of the arts, industrial and political, to gods and semi-divine heroes.
Thus the artist and artisan merely observe, as has been noted in another connection, ready-made models and patterns, and unquestioningly follow procedures antecedently established. Patterns and methods are accepted as belonging to the objective nature of things; there is next to no sense of any connection between them and personal desire and thought; to introduce such a connection would evince a dangerously subversive spirit. The point of view therein displayed is so far from that which animates modern psychology and philosophy that it is not easily recoverable; yet we do not have even today to go far to find a like notion regulative of action and belief. The mechanic who follows blueprints and a procedure dictated by his machine in the production of standardized commodities would, if he were both articulate and uncognizant of inventions by others, say the same thing. Legal formalities consciously adopt similar realistic conceptions in politics and morals, and find the exhibition of the spirit which they take for granted in science and industry to be anarchistic and destructive in less technical fields. Standards and patterns seem to them to be given in the nature of things; the intervention of initiative and invention, of individuality, are counted contrary to reason as well as to sincerity and loyalty.
When experience is of this sort, an individual worker or demiurge has only to observe and conform. He is but a case to be subsumed in a fixed whole as far as may be; what is left over is merely quantitative and accidental. Plato found in the arts exemplifications of fixed archetypes governing particular processes of change through imparting to them measure and proportion; hence changes as far as knowable were subject in advance to the dialectic of geometry. As in the Philebus, measure comes first; then comes the measured, the symmetrical and beautiful; conscious mind and wisdom are in the third rank as observation of measure and the measured antecedently established. In similar fashion, Aristotle could draw his account of the four fundamental affairs of nature from analysis of the procedure of artisan, with no suspicion that he was thereby subjecting his metaphysics to an anthropomorphic rendering of nature; setting up the cumulative deposit of individual variations of insight and skill as the measure of nature. It is inept to charge these thinkers with hypostatizing psychical states and processes. Since their own experience exhibited subordination of individualized mind to objects, operations, patterns and ends that were preestablished and presented ready-made and complete, their metaphysic and logic were in so far a faithful report of what they found. Greek philosophy converted not psychological conditions but positive institutional affairs into cosmic realities. The idea that generalization, purposes, etc., are individual mental processes did not originate until experience had registered such a change that the functions of individualized mind were productive of objective achievements and hence capable of external observation.
When this happened, an extraordinary revolution occurred. The conception of the individual changed completely. No longer was the individual something complete, perfect, finished, an organized whole of parts united by the impress of a comprehensive form. What was prized as individuality was now something moving, changing, discrete, and above all initiating instead of final. As long as deviation of particulars from established order meant disorder, the metaphysics and logic of subordination of parts to the form of a pre-formed whole was reasonable. Mind as individualized could be recognized in other than a pejorative sense only when its variations were social, utilized in generating greater social security and fullness of life. This was possible only when social relationships were heterogeneous and expansive, when demand for initiative, invention and variation exceeded that for adherence and conformity. It is noteworthy that even Plato with all his zeal for a fixed organized whole could not imagine its coming into being save through the effort of some happily constituted and fortunately placed individual. Social heterogeneity alone does not promote a functioning of variations for socially desirable consequences, and thereby constitute individuality as something objective and socially acknowledged. It may signify only a break up of pious adherence to a cumulative and conserved outcome of prior history. But let there be a situation in which the tradition of order and unity is still vital while the actual state of affairs is one of variation and conflict, and there is a situation in which dependence must perforce be placed on individuality. Even though its office be conceived at first as merely restorative, a return to an earlier and better state of affairs, as Italians thinkers would return to Greco-Roman culture and the early protestant to primitive Christianity, yet the operation of individuals rather than that of collective tradition is the hope and reliance. Under such circumstances, particularized centres of initiation and energy are prized because being emancipated from the net work of current forces, they are free to direct change to new objective consequences.
Individualism in modern life has been understood in diverse ways. To those retaining the classic tradition, it is a revolt of undisciplined barbarians, reverting to the spontaneous petulant egotism of childhood; in another version of this underlying idea, it is rebellion of unre-generate human nature against divine authority, established among men for their salvation. To still others, it is emancipation, the achieving of voluntary maturity; courageous independence in throwing off all external yokes and bondages, in asserting that every human being is an end in himself; in effect a transfer to each conscious unit of honorific predicates previously reserved for the class, species, universal. In any case, an individual is no longer just a particular, a part without meaning save in an inclusive whole, but is a subject, self, a distinctive centre of desire, thinking and aspiration.
An adherent of empirical denotative method can hardly accept either the view which regards subjective mind as an aberration or that which makes it an independent creative source. Empirically, it is an agency of novel reconstruction of a preexisting order. Criticism of the history of political theory during the formation of modern European states may bring out the difference between such a view and that of both classic universalism and extreme modern subjectivism. The older theory had asserted that the state exists by nature. The modern declared that it existed by means of agreements between individuals who willed the institution of civil order. We may imagine reformers of the seventeenth century saying that the states they found about them did indeed exist by nature-that was precisely what was the matter with them. Because they were natural products, they were products of force, chance, fraud, tyranny. Hence they were naturally the scene of war, foreign and domestic, of servitudes and inequities, of intrigue and harsh coercion -one huge historical accident. A just and good state would be one brought into existence by voluntary convention; by promises exchanged and obligations mutually undertaken. A good state exists not by nature but by the contriving activities of individual selves in behalf of the satisfaction of their needs. It implies art, not nature; a clear perception by individuals of what they want and of the conditions through which their wants can be satisfied. In detail, thinkers divided into opposite schools. Some held that by nature individuals are non-social, becoming social when subjected to discipline by artificial and instituted law to which they are naturally adverse. Others attributed to the natural individual some degree of friendly and genial inclination. Both schools agreed that just political order, legitimate authority and subordination, is a product of voluntary conjunction of individuals naturally exempt from the universal of civil law.
The truth of which the social compact was a symbol is that social institutions as they exist can be bettered only through the deliberate interventions of those who free their minds from the standards of the order which obtains. The underlying fact was the perception of the possibility of a change, a change for the better, in social organization. The fact that the intent of the perception was veiled and distorted by the myth of an aboriginal single and one-f or-all decisive meeting of wills is instructive as an aberration, but the myth should not disguise the intent and consequence. Social conditions were altered so that there were both need and opportunity for inventive and planning activities, initiated by innovating thought, and carried to conclusion only as the initiating mind secured the sympathetic assent of other individuals.
I say individual minds, not just individuals with minds. The difference between the two ideas is radical. There is an easy way by which thinkers avoid the necessity of facing a genuine problem. It starts with a self, whether bodily or spiritual being immaterial for present purposes, and then endows or identifies that self with mind, a formal capacity of apprehension, devising and belief. On the basis of this assumption, any mind is open to entertain any thought or belief whatever. There is here no problem involved of breaking loose from the weight of tradition and custom, of initiating observations and reflections, forming designs and plans, undertaking experiments on the basis of hypotheses, diverging from accepted doctrines and traditions. Or when it is observed that this departure occurs infrequently and is not easy, some vague reference to genius and originality disposes of the question. But the whole history of science, art and morals proves that the mind that appears in individuals is not as such individual mind. The former is in itself a system of belief, recognitions, and ignorances, of acceptances and rejections, of expectancies and appraisals of meanings which have been instituted under the influence of custom and tradition.
It is not easy to break away from current and established classifications and interpretations of the world. The difficulty in this respect, however, is eased by the notion that after all it is only error that the mind needs to cut loose from, and that it can do this by direct appeal to nature, by applying pure observation and reflection to pure objects. This notion of course is fiction; objects of knowledge are not given to us defined, classified, and labeled, ready for labels and pigeon-holes. We bring to the simplest observation a complex apparatus of habits, of accepted meanings and techniques. Otherwise observation is the blankest of stares, and the natural object is a tale told by an idiot, full only of sound and fury. In the case of social objects and patterns, institutions and arrangements, we have not the benefit of the mitigating fiction of direct correction by appeal of transparent mind to the court of nature. There is a contrast between pltysical objects and objects as they are believed to be, even though what they are believed to be is an unescapable medium in observing what they are. Where is such a contrast to be found in the case of existing social institutions and standards? The contrast is not, as it seems to be in the case of knowledge of physical existence, between a belief which is defective or false and an existence which is real; it is between an existence which is actual, and a belief, desire and aspiration for something which is better but non-existent.
Such facts exemplify the difference between a bodily or a psychic self with a mind and mind as individual. Either the better social object is sheer illusion, or else individual thought and desire denote a distinctive and unique mode of existence, an object held in solution, undergoing transformation, to emerge finally as an established and public object. Reference to imagination is pertinent. But the reference is too frequently used to disguise and avoid recognition of the essential fact and the problems involved hi it. Imagination as mere reverie is one thing, a natural and additive event, complete in itself, a terminal object rich and consoling, or trivial and silly, as may be. Imagination which terminates in a modification of the objective order, in the institution of a new object is other than a merely added occurrence. It involves a dissolution of old objects and a forming of new ones in a medium which, since it is beyond the old object and not yet in a new one, can properly be termed subjective.
The point in placing emphasis upon the role of individual desire and thought in social life has in part been indicated. It shows the genuinely intermediate position of subjective mind: it proves it to be a mode of natural existence in which objects undergo directed reconstitu-tion. Reference to ,the place of individual thought in political theory and practice has another value. Unless subjective intents and thoughts are to terminate in picturesque Utopias or dogmas irrelevant to constructive action, they are subject to objective requirements and tests. Even in the crudest form of the contract theory, men had to do something. They had at least to meet together, come to agreement, give guarantees, and govern their subsequent conduct by agreements reached, or else suffer a tangible penalty. Thinking and desiring, no matter how subjective, are a preliminary, tentative and inchoate mode of action. They are "overt" behavior of a communicated and public form in process of construction, and behavior involves change of objects which tests the meanings animating behavior.
There is a peculiar intrinsic privacy and incommunica-bility attending the preparatory intermediate stage. When an old essence or meaning is in process of dissolution and a new one has not taken shape even as a hypothetical scheme, the intervening existence is too fluid and formless for publication, even to one's self. Its very existence is ceaseless transformation. Limits from which and to which are objective, generic, stateable; not so that which occurs between these limits. This process of flux and ineffability is intrinsic to any thought which is subjective and private. It marks "consciousness" as bare event. It is absurd to call a recognition or a conception subjective or mental because it takes place through a physically or socially numerically distinct existence; by this logic a house disappears from the spatial and material world when it becomes my house; even a physical movement would then be subjective when referred to particles.
Recognition of an object, conception of a meaning may be mine rather than yours; yours rather than his, at a particular moment; but this fact is about me or you, not about the object and essence perceived and conceived. Acknowledgment of this fact is compatible however with the conviction that after all there would be no objects to be perceived, no meanings to be conceived, if at some period of time uniquely individualized events had not intervened. There is a difference in kind between the thought which manipulates received objects and essences to derive new ones from their relations and implications, and the thought which generates a new method of observing and classifying them. It is like the difference between readjusting the parts of a wagon to make it more efficient, and the invention of the steam locomotive. One is formal and additive; the other is qualitative and transformative. He knows little who supposes that freedom of thought is ensured by relaxation of conventions, censorships and intolerant dogmas. The relaxation supplies opportunity. But while it is a necessary it is not a sufficient condition. Freedom of thought denotes freedom of thinking; specific doubting, inquiring, suspense, creating and cultivating of tentative hypotheses, trials or experimentings that are unguaranteed and that involve risks of waste, loss, and error. Let us admit the case of the conservative; if we once start thinking no one can guarantee where we shall come out, except that many objects, ends and institutions are surely doomed. Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.
In approaching the exaggerations of individual mind found in modern philosophy which go by the name of subjectivism and a large part of what is termed idealism, we may profitably recur to ancient thought. The question of the relation of the objective and subjective did not present itself under that name. The problem of the relation of the "natural" and the "positive" covered at least part of the same ground, and in a way closer to experience than does the course taken by much modern philosophy. The "positive" was a term used to cover everything of distinctively human institution, in languages, customs, manners, codes, laws, governments. The issue was whether nature was a norm for these arrangements or whether they were something to which nature should submit. The classic answer was in the former sense. But there were those who regarded nature as raw, crude, wild, and who thought of man and his doings as the standard and measure of nature.
The former conception, under theological sanctions and interpretations, was adopted into the medieval conception of natural law, and made absolutely controlling in morals and politics, wherever not supplemented by revelation, which after all was revelation of a higher nature. To put the problem in terms of the connection between nature and institutions has an advantage over the isolation of the ego by modern philosophy. It acknowledged the social factor. Even when the origin of the positive was sought in the will, in the decrees and enactments of particular persons, the latter were thought of as possessing a socially representative office, as heroes, lawgivers, not as isolated individual minds.
The complete subordination of the positive to natural law in the medieval version of the classic theory involved modern thought in a peculiar embarrassment when interest in humanity as distinct from divinity revived. The institutions which men wished to modify, for which they wished to substitute others or to which they wished to add others of a secular sort, were bound up with divinity, with authoritative natural and revealed law. It was not possible to put institutions as such in contrast to nature, for by accepted theory existing institutions were in the main expressions of the law of nature. The resource which offered itself was to place the mind of the individual as such in contrast to both nature and institutions. This historic fact, reinforced with the conspicuous assertion of medievalism that the individual soul is the ultimate end and ultimate subject of salvation or damnation, affords, it seems to me, the background and source of the isolation of the ego, the thinking self, in all philosophy influenced by either the new science or Protestantism. Descartes as well as Berkeley uses "self" as an equivalent of "mind," and does so spontaneously, as a matter of course, without attempt at argument and justification. If the given science of nature and given positive institutions expressed arbitrary prejudice, unintelligent custom and chance episodes, where could or should mind be found except in the independent and self-initiated activities of individuals? Wholesale revolt against tradition led to the illusion of equally wholesale isolation of mind as something wholly individual. Revolting and reforming thinkers like Descartes little noted how much of tradition they repeated and perpetuated in their very protests and reforms.
An adequate recognition of the empirical historical causes of the exaggeration of the ego in modern philosophy, due to its isolation from social customs, and these from the physical world, makes, it seems to me, criticism of the forms which it has assumed almost unnecessary. Thinkers may start out with a naive assumption of minds connected with separate individuals. But developments soon show the inadequacy of such "minds" to carry the burden of science and objective institutions, like the family and state. The consequence was revealed to be sceptical, disintegrative, malicious. A transcendental supra-empirical self, making human, or "finite," selves its medium of manifestation, was the logical recourse. Such a conception is an inevitable conclusion, when the value of liberation and utilization of individual capacity in science, art, industry, and politics is a demonstrated empirical fact; and when at the same time, individuality instead of being conceived as historic, intermediate, temporally relative and instrumental, is conceived of as original, eternal and absolute. When concrete reconstructions of natural and social objects are thought of as a single and constitutive act, they inevitably become supernatural or transcendental. When the movement terminates, as in the later philosophy of Josiah Royce, with a "community of selves," the circle has returned to the empirical fact with which it might properly have started out; but the intervening insertion of a transcendent ego remains as a plague. It isolates the community of selves from natural existence and in order to get nature again in connection with mind, is compelled to reduce it to a system of volitions, feelings and thoughts.
It remains to mention another historic factor which helps account for the vogue of subjectivism in art and literature, through which it found its way more or less into common belief. Comte several times recurs to the idea that idiocy represents an excess of objectivism, a subordination of feelings and impressions to objects as given, while madness marks an excess of subjectivism. Still more significant is his added remark, that madness has to be construed historically and sociologically. Under primitive conditions all the larger ideas about nature are reveries constructed in the interest of emotions. Myths were fancies, but they were not insanities because they were the only reply to the challenge of nature which existing instrumentalities permitted. Assertion of similar ideas today is insanity, because available intellectual resources and agencies make possible and require radically different adjustments. To entertain and believe fancies which once were spontaneous and general is today a sign of failure, of mental disequilibration. Inability to employ the methods of forming and checking beliefs which are available at a given time, whatever be the source of that inability, constitutes a disorientation. These considerations are not introduced to make the offensive insinuation that philosophic subjectivism is a mode of insanity, and philosophic realism a mode of idiocy. The purpose is to suggest that while the tendency to revery, to intellectual somnambulism, is universal, the use made of revery-which may roughly stand for the subjective element in mind- depends upon contemporary conditions. In one situation fancy generates stories which are consistent with desire and are attractive. These are connected with ceremonies to which, in addition to their immediate good, external efficiency is imputed. They become nuclei about which observations and ideas continually gather; they are centres of mental as well as emotional systematizations. It is no wonder that myths long prevail. When the development of industry and tested inquiry makes it evident that the actual world will not accept them nor stand for them, their actuating springs remain in full force and the river of revery still flows. It may find public or communicated form in fiction recognized as such, in novel, drama and poetry which are enjoyed, although their objects are not believed in. Or they may remain private, and, with the play of desires and affections that produce them, constitute a new world enjoyed for its own sake-the "inner life."
The popular factor in subjectivism, that which renders philosophic subjectivism intelligible enough to prevent its being regarded as mere vagary, seems to be a confused union of two considerations. On the one hand there is the recognition, enforced by the course of events, of the constructive power of mind as individual, its re-creative function in objects of industry, art, and politics. On the other hand there is the discovery and exploitation of the inner life, a new, readily accessible and cheaply enjoyed esthetic field. The tales that will not be believed when they are told and that cannot be told in forms sufficiently artistic to command the attention of others, may still be told to one's self and afford relief, consolation and thrill. Products of fancy that cannot, because of the advance of knowledge, secure credence as reports of objective events, are castles in the air, but these castles are impregnable inner refuges.
The person who knows nothing of sensations or sensa, as the psychologist and epistemologist talk about them, is nevertheless aware that objects are other than bare things to which beliefs must subject themselves. He is aware that when things escape his power of control, they still generate "impressions" which he can entertain in all sorts of enjoyable and annoying ways. If he is devoid of ability to regulate conduct in actual employment of objects, this world of impressions will be one in which he loves to dwell. Its materials are pliable and exact no responsibility. He may be utterly innocent of the reduction of objects by theorists into conjoined sensations and images; the notion that his table consists largely of images would be to him a wild vagary, contradictory of common-sense. But he knows very well that the incidents of life may produce fancies in him that are more exciting or more soothing than the incidents themselves. When there is neither the power to renounce revery nor to use it in any objective embodiment, we have a condition in which soil and atmosphere are prepared to find the spirit of subjective idealism congenial, even if the technical facts adduced and the dialectic employed in its behalf are beyond reach.
Our statements, however, are one-sided, as far as the full scope of the "inner life" is concerned. It is the home of aspirations and ideals that are noble and that may in time receive fulfillment as well as of figments and airy nothings. It may be charged with infinite humor and tragedy. It affords a realm in which king and court fool, prince and pauper, meet as equals. It is subject-matter for the philosopher as well as for the rebuffed and wistful. Recall the contrast which Royce had drawn between the dominant externalism of the seventeenth century and the spirit of the eighteenth. "It is no matter whether you are a philosopher and write essays on The Principles of Human Knowledge' or whether you are a heroine in an eighteenth century novel, and write sentimental letters to a friend; you are part of the same movement. The spirit is dissatisfied with the mathematical order, and feels unfriendliness among the eternities of sevententh-century thought. The spirit wants to be at home with itself, well-friended in the comprehension of its inner processes. It loves to be confidential in its heart outpourings, keen in its analysis, humane in its attitude toward life."
We are given to referring the beginnings of subjectivism to Descartes, with his penseg as the indubitable certainty, or to Locke with his simple idea as immediate object. Technically or with respect to later dialectical developments, this reference is correct enough. But historically it is wrong. Descartes' thought is the nous of classic tradition forced inwards because physical science had extruded it from its object. Its internality is a logical necessity of the attempt to reconcile the new science with the old tradition, not a thing intrinsically important. Similarly Locke's simple idea is the classic Idea, Form or Species dislodged from nature and compelled to take refuge in mind. For Locke, it is coerced by external existence and remains coercive for all subsequent intellectual operations. The subjective as such is alien to Locke's way of thinking; his whole bias is against it, and in favor of what is grounded in nature being a matter of relations already established. The "simple idea" is merely man's available point of contact with the objective order; and in this contact resides its whole import.
From the standpoint of "inner life" the simple idea became however, a sensation, that is, a feeling, a state of mind, an intrinsically interesting event having its own significant career. If this were true of such a rudimentary thing as blue or soft, how much more significantly it holds of imagination and emotion. Inner reveries and enjoyments constitute freedom to the natural man. Everywhere else is constraint, whether it be of study, of science, family life, industry, or government. The road to freedom by escape into the inner life is no modern discovery; it was taken by savages, by the oppressed, by children, long before it was formulated in philosophical romanticism. The generalized awareness of the fact is new however, and it added a new dimension to characteristically modern experience. It created new forms of art and new theories of esthetics, often promulgated by literary artists who have nothing but contempt for philosophical theories as such. Mr. Santayana is a thinker whose intent and basis are at one with classic thought. But if we note the importance assumed in his thinking by the "inward landscape," there is before us a measure of the pervasive influence of the kind of experience that was seized upon by Romanticism as the exclusive truth of experience.
The function of individualized mind in furthering experiment and invention and the directed reconstruction of events, together with the discovery that objects of sentiment and fancy, although rejected by the order of events in space and time, may form the contents of an inner and private realm, finds its legitimate outcome in the conception of experiencing, and in the discrimination of experiencing into a diversity of states and processes. To the Greeks, experience was the outcome of accumulation of practical acts, sufferings and perception gradually built up into the skill of the carpenter, shoemaker, pilot, farmer, general, and politician. There was nothing merely personal or subjective about it; it was a consolidation, effected by nature, of particular natural occurrences into actualization of the forms of such things as are thus and so usually, now and then, upon the whole, but not necessarily and always. Experience was adequate and final for this kind of thing because it was as much their culminating actualization as rational thought was the actualization of the forms of things that are what they are necessarily. To Aristotle, the copula was a true verb, always affected by tense. Things which fully and completely are, have been, will be, and now are exactly the same; their matter is completely mastered by form. Concerning them we can say "is" with demonstrative certainty: such things are few, though supremely good, and are the objects of science. Of other things we can only say that they have been and are not at the present time, or that though not existing at the present moment they may exist at some unspecified future tune. Of them we can say "is" only with a perhaps or a probably, since they are subject to chance. In them matter is not wholly subdued to form. Experience is the actualization through an organic body of just these affairs. Experience was not some person's; it was nature'st localized in a body as that body happened to exist by nature.
As was remarked in the introductory chapter one can hardly use the term "experience" in philosophical discourse, but a critic rises to inquire "Whose experience?" The question is asked in adverse criticism. Its implication is that experience by its very nature is owned by some one; and that the ownership is such in kind that everything about experience is affected by a private and exclusive quality. The implication is as absurd as it would be to infer from the fact that houses are usually owned, are mine and yours and his, that possessive reference so permeates the properties of being a house that nothing intelligible can be said about the latter. It is obvious, however, that a house can be owned only when it has existence and properties independent of being owned. The quali-ity of belonging to some one is not an all-absorbing maw in which independent properties and relations disappear to be digested into egohood. It is additive; it marks the assumption of a new relationship, in consequence of which the house, the common, ordinary, house, acquires new properties. It is subject to taxes; the owner has the right to exclude others from entering it; he enjoys certain privileges and immunities with respect to it and is also exposed to certain burdens and liabilities.
Substitute "experience" for "house," and no other word need be changed. Experience when it happens has the same dependence upon objective natural events, physical and social, as has the occurrence of a house. It has its own objective and definitive traits; these can be described without reference to a self, precisely as a house is of brick, has eight rooms, etc., irrespective of whom it belongs to. Nevertheless, just as for some purposes and with respect to some consequences, it is all important to note the added qualification of personal ownership of real property, so with "experience." In first instance and intent, it is not exact nor relevant to say "I experience" or "I think." "It" experiences or is experienced, "it" thinks or is thought, is a juster phrase. Experience, a serial course of affairs with their own characteristic properties and relationships, occurs, happens, and is what it is. Among and within these occurrences, not outside of them nor underlying them, are those events which are denominated selves. In some specifiable respects and for some specifiable consequences, these selves, capable of objective denotation just as are sticks, stones, and stars, assume the care and administration of certain objects and acts in experience. Just as in the case of the house, this assumption of ownership brings with it further liabilities and assets, burdens and enjoyments.
To say in a significant way, "I think, believe, desire, instead of barely it is thought, believed, desired," is to accept and affirm a responsibility and to put forth a claim. It does not mean that the self is the source or author of the thought and affection nor its exclusive seat. It signifies that the self as a centred organization of energies identifies itself (in the sense of accepting their consequences) with a belief or sentiment of independent and external origination. The absurdity of any other conception appears upon examination of such affairs as are designated by "I do not believe" or "I do not like;" in them it is obvious that a relationship of incompatibility between two distinct and denoted objects is contained.
Authorship and liability look in two different ways, one to the past, the other to the future. Natural events- including social habits-originate thoughts and feelings. To say "/ think, hope and love" is to say in effect tnat genesis is not the last word; instead of throwing the blame or the credit for the belief, affection and expectation upon nature, one's family, church, or state, one declares one's self to be henceforth a partner. An adoptive act is proclaimed in virtue of which one claims the benefit of future goods and admits liability for future ills flowing from the affair in question. Even hi the most "individualistic" society some properties remain communal; and many things, like the bowels of the earth and the depths of the seas, are unowned by either group or person. The cogent line of defense of the institution of private property is that it promotes prudence, accountability, ingenuity and security, in the production and administration of commodities and resources which exist independently of the relationship of property. In like fashion, not all thoughts and emotions are owned either socially or personally; and either mode of appropriation has to be justified on the basis of distinctive consequences.
Analytic reflection shows that the ordinary conception of causation as a trait belonging to some one thing is the Idea of responsibility read backward. The idea that some one thing, or any two or three things, are the cause of an occurrence is in effect an application of the idea of credit or blame-as in the Greek atria. There is nothing in nature that belongs absolutely and exclusively to anything else; belonging is always a matter of reference and distributive assignment, justified in any particular case as far as it works out well. Greek metaphysics and logic are dominated by the idea of inherent belonging and exclusion; another instance of naively reading the story of nature in language appropriate to human association. Modern science has liberated physical events from the domination of the notions of intrinsic belonging and exclusion, but it has retained the idea with exacerbated vigor in the case of psychological events. The elimination of the category from physics and its retention in psychology has provided a seeming scientific basis for the division between psychology and physics, and thereby for the egotism of modern philosophy. Much subjectivism is only a statement of the logical consequences of the doctrine sponsored by psychological "science" of the monopolistic possession of mental phenomena by a self; or, after the idea of an underlying spiritual substance became shaky, of the doctrine that mental events as such constitute all there is to selfhood. For the philosophical implications of the latter idea, as far as privacy, monopoly and exclusiveness of causation and belonging are concerned, are similar to those of the older dogma when it was applied to cosmic nature.
Enough, however, of negation. The positive consequence is an understanding of the shift of emphasis from the experienced, the objective subject-matter, the what, to the experiencing, the method of its course, the how of its changes. Such a shift occurs whenever the problem of control of production of consequences arises. As long as men are content to enjoy and suffer fire when it happens, fire is just an objective entity which is what it is. That it may be taken as a deity to be adored or propitiated, is evidence that its "whatness" is all there is to it. But when men come to the point of making fire, fire is not an essence, but a mode of natural phenomena, an order in change, a "how" of a historic sequence. The change from immediate use in enjoyment and suffering is equivalent to recognition of a method of procedure, and of the alliance of insight into method with possibility of control.
The development of the conception of experiencing as a distinctive operation is akin to the growth of the idea of fire-making out of direct experiences with fire. Fire is fire, inherently just what it is; but making fire is relational. It takes thought away from fire to the other things that help and prevent its occurrence. So with experience in the sense of things that are experienced; they are what they are. But their occurrence as experienced things is ascertained to be dependent upon attitudes and dispositions; the manner of their happening is found to be affected by the habits of an organic individual. Since myth and science concern the same objects in the same natural world, sun, moon, and stars, the difference between them cannot be determined exclusively on the basis of these natural objects. A differential has to found in distinctive ways of experiencing natural objects; it is perceived that man is an emotional and imaginative as well as an observing and reasoning creature, and that different manners of experiencing affect the status of subject-matter experienced. Capacity to distinguish between the sun and moon of science and these same things as they figure in myth and cult depends upon capacity to distinguish different attitudes and dispositions of the subject; the heroes of legend and poetry are discriminated from historic characters when memory, imagination and idealizing emotion are taken into the reckoning. Again, it is discovered that the good of some objects is connected with one way of experiencing, namely appetite, while the acquisition of goodness by other objects is dependent upon the operation of reflection. In consequence, the experienced objects are differentiated as to their goodness, although good as an essence is unchanged.
The importance of modes of experiencing for control of experienced objects may be illustrated from economic theory. A study of various economic essences or concepts is possible:-definition, classification and dialectical reference to one another of such meanings as value, utility, rent, exchange, profit, wages, etc. There is also possible a positivistic study of existential economic regimes, resulting in description of their structures and operations. If the presence and operation of dispositions and attitudes be neglected, these alternatives exhaust the field of inquiry. Neither the study of objective essences nor of objective existences is available, however, in problems of polity, in management of economic events. When the "psychological" factor is introduced, say, a study of the effects of certain ways of experiencing, such as incentives, desires, fatigue, monotony, habit, waste-motions, insecurity, prestige, team work, fashion, esprit de corps, and a multitude of like factors, the situation changes. Factors that are within control are specified, and a fuller degree of deliberate administration of events is made possible. The objectivity of events remains what it was, but the discovery of the r61e of personal dispositions in conditioning their occurrence, enables us to interpret and connect them in new ways, ways, which are susceptible of greater regulation than were the other ways. Banks, stores, factories do not become psychical when we ascertain the part played in their genesis and operation by psychological factors; they remain as external to the organism and to a particular mind as ever they were, things experienced as are winds and stars. But we get a new leverage, intellectual and practical, upon them when we can convert description of ready-made events and dialectical relation of ready-made notions into an account of a way of occurrence. For a perceived mode of becoming is always ready to be translated into a method of production and direction.
Since modern natural science has been concerned with discovery of conditions of production, to be employed as means for consequences, the development of interest in attitudes of individual subjects-the psychological interest-is but an extension of its regular business. Knowledge of conditions of the occurrence of experienced objects is not complete until we have included organic conditions as well as extra-organic conditions. Knowledge of the latter may account for a happening in the abstract but not for the concrete or experienced happening. A general knowledge of dispositions and attitudes renders us exactly the same sort of intellectual and practical service as possession of physical constants. The trouble lies in the inadequacy of our present psychological knowledge. And it is probably this deficiency, which renders such psychological knowledge as we possess unavailable for technological control, which, joined to spontaneous interest in "inner" life, has set off psychological subject-matter as a separate world of existence, instead of a discovery of attitudes and dispositions involved in the world of common experience. In truth, attitudes, dispositions and their kin, while capable of being distinguished and made concrete intellectual objects, are never separate existences. They are always of, from, toward, situations and things. They may be studied with a minimum of attention to the things at and away from which they are directed. The things with which they are concerned may for purposes of inquiry be represented by a blank, a symbol to be specifically filled in as occasion demands. But except as ways of seeking, turning from, appropriating, treating things, they have no existence nor significance.
Every type of culture has experienced resistance and frustration. These events are interpreted according to the bias dominating a particular type of culture. To the modern European mind they have been interpreted as results of the opposed existence of subject and object as independent forms of Being. The notion is now so established in tradition that to many thinkers it appears to be a datum, not an interpretative classification. But the East Indian has envisaged the same phenomena as evidence of the contrast of an illusory world to which corresponds domination by desires and a real world due to emancipation from desires, attained through ascetic discipline and meditation. The Greeks interpreted the same experience on the basis of the cosmic discrepancy of being and becoming, form and matter, as the reluctance of existence to become a complete and transparent medium of meaning. Taken absolutely, the interpretation on the basis of opposition of subject and object has no advantage over the other doctrines; it is a local and provincial interpretation. Taken inherently or absolutely, it has an absurdity from which they are free; for subject and object antithetically defined can have logically no transactions with each other. Taken as a factor in the enterprise of overcoming resistance and reducing the prospects of frustration, statement in terms of distinction of subject and object is intelligible, and is more valuable than the other modes of statement. Object is, as Basil Gildersleeve said, that which objects, that to which frustration is due. But it is also the objects; the final and eventual consummation, an integrated secure independent state of affairs. The subject is that which suffers, is subjected and which endures resistance and frustration; it is also that which attempts subjection of hostile conditions; that which takes the immediate initiative in remaking the situation as it stands. Subjective and objective distinguished as factors in a regulated effort at modification of the environing world have an intelligible meaning. Subjectivism as an "ism" converts this historic, relative and instrumental status and function into something absolute and fixed; while pure "objectivism" is a doctrine of fatalism.
To-day there is marked revival of objectivism, even of externalism. The world of physical science is no longer new and strange; to many it is now familiar; while many of those to whom it is personally unfamiliar take it for granted on authority. To a considerable extent its subject-matter is taking the place of the subject-matter of older creeds as something given ready-made, demanding unhesitating credence and passive acceptance. The doctrine of the opposition of subject and object in knowledge is fading, becoming reminiscent; that sense of strain which is lacking accompanied transition from one set of beliefs to another very different set. Only in politics and economics is the opposition of subject and institutional object poignant. And even in these fields radical and conservative increasingly appeal to objects which are collective, non-individual. The conservative recurs to the objectivism of established institutions, idealized into intrinsic stability; the radical looks forward to the completed outcome of an objective and necessary economic evolution. In spite of the appeal to the catchwords of individualism, private initiative, voluntary abstinence, personal industry and effort, there is more danger at present that the genuinely creative effort of the individual will be lost than there is of any return to earlier individualism. Everything makes for the mass. When private property is talked about, the product of individual labor is no longer meant; but a legally buttressed institution. Capital is no longer the outcome of deliberate personal sacrifice, but is an institution of corporations and finance with massive political and social ramifications. Appeals to secure action of a certain sort may use the old words; but the fears and hopes which are now aroused are not really connected with freedom of individual thought and effort, but with the objective foundations of society, established "law and order."
This resort to an objectivism which ignores initiating and re-organizing desire and imagination will in the end only strengthen that other phase of subjectivism which consists in escape to the enjoyment of inward landscape. Men who are balked of a legitimate realization of their subjectivity, men who are forced to confine innovating need and projection of ideas to technical modes of industrial and political life, and to specialized or "scientific" fields of intellectual activity, will compensate by finding release within their inner consciousness. There will be one philosophy, a realistic one, for mathematics, physical science and the established social order; another, and opposed, philosophy for the affairs of personal life. The objection to dualism is not just that it is a dualism, but that it forces upon us antithetical, non-convertible principles of formulation and interpretation. If there is complete split in nature and experience then of course no ingenuity can explain it away; it must be accepted. But in case no such sharp division actually exists, the evils of supposing there is one are not confined to philosophical theory. Consequences within philosophy as such are of no great import. But philosophical dualism is but a formulated recognition of an impasse" in life; an impotence in interaction, inability to make effective transition, limitation of power to regulate and thereby to understand. Capricious pragmatism based on exaltation of personal desire; consolatory estheticism based on capacity for wringing contemplative enjoyment from even the tragedies of the outward spectacle; refugee idealism based on rendering thought omnipotent in the degree in which it is ineffective in concrete affairs;-these forms of subjectivism register an acceptance of whatever obstacles at the time prevent the active participation of the self in the ongoing course of events. Only when obstacles are treated as challenges to remaking of personal desire and thought, so that the latter integrate with the movement of nature and by participation direct its consequences, are opposition and duality rightly understood.
Existentially speaking, a human individual is distinctive opacity of bias and preference conjoined with plasticity and permeability of needs and likings. One trait tends to isolation, discreteness; the other trait to connection, continuity. This ambivalent character is rooted in nature, whose events have their own distinctive indifferencies, resistances, arbitrary closures and intolerances, and also their peculiar openness, warm responsiveness, greedy seekings and transforming unions. The conjunction in nature of whimsical contingency and lawful uniformity is the result of these two characters of events. They persist upon the human plane, and as ultimate characters are ineradicable. Boundaries, demarcations, abrupt, and expansive over-reachings of boundaries impartially and conjunctively mark every phase of human life.
The human individual in his opacity of bias is in so far doomed to a blind solitariness. He hugs himself in his isolation and fights against disclosure, the give and take of communication, as for the very integrity of existence. Even communicable meanings are tinged with color of the uncommunicated; there is a quality of reserve in every publicity. Everything may be done with this irreducible uniqueness except to get rid of it. The sense of it may add a bitter loneliness to experience. It may lead to restless insatiable throwing of the self into every opportunity of external business and dissipation in order to escape from it. It may be cherished, nurtured, developed into a cultivated consolatory detachment from the affairs of life, ending in the delusion of the superiority of the private inner life to all else, or in the illusion that one can really succeed in emancipating himself in his pure inwardness from connection with the world and society. It may express itself in elaborated schemes of self-pity and in bursts of defiant exclamation: Here I stand and cannot otherwise. It may lead to unreasoned loyalty to seemingly lost causes and forlorn hopes-and events may sometimes justify the faith.
Romanticism has made the best and the worst of the discovery of the private and incommunicable. It has converted a pervasive and inevitable color and temper of experience into its substance. In conceiving that this inexpugnable uniqueness, this ultimate singularity, exhausts the self, it has created a vast and somnambulic egotism out of the fact of subjectivity. For every existence in addition to its qualitative and intrinsic boundaries has affinities and active outreachings for connection and intimate union. It is an energy of attraction, expansion and supplementation. The ties and bonds of associated life are spontaneous uncalculated manifestations of this phase of human selfhood, as the union of hydrogen and oxygen is natural and unpremeditated. Sociability, communication are just as immediate traits of the concrete individual as is the privacy of the closet of consciousness. To define one's self within closed limits, and then to try out the self in expansive acts that inevitably result in an eventual breaking down of the walled-in self, are equally natural and inevitable acts. Here is the ultimate "dialectic" of the universal and individual. One no sooner establishes his private and subjective self than he demands it be recognized and acknowledged by others, even if he has to invent an imaginary audience or an Absolute Self to satisfy the demand. And no person taught by experience ever escapes the reflection that no matter how much he does for himself, what endures is only what is done for others: an observation however which is most comforting when it takes the form of attributing desire to serve others to acts which indulge the exclusive self.
In some form or other, the dualism erected between the ego and the world of things and persons represents failure to attain solution of the problem set by this ambiguous nature of the self. It is a formulated acceptance of oscillation between surrender to the external and assertion of the inner. In science and in art, especially in the art of intercourse, real solutions occur. Private bias manages in them to manifest itself in innovations and deviations, which reshape the world of objects and institutions, and which eventually facilitate communication and understanding. Thereby the final and efficient, the limiting and the expansive, attain a harmony which they do not possess in other natural events.
Thus an individual existence has a double status and import. There is the individual that belongs in a continuous system of connected events which reinforce its activities and which form a world in which it is at home, consistently at one with its own preferences, satisfying its requirements. Such an individual is in its world as a member, extending as far as the moving equilibrium of which it is a part lends support. It is a natural end, not as an abrupt and immediate termination but as a fulfillment. Then there is the individual that finds a gap between its distinctive bias and the operations of the things through which alone its need can be satisfied; it is broken off, discrete, because it is at odds with its surroundings. It either surrenders, conforms, and for the sake of peace becomes a parasitical subordinate, indulges in egotistical solitude; or its activities set out to remake conditions in accord with desire. In the latter process, intelligence is born-not mind which appropriates and enjoys the whole of which it is a part, but mind as individualized, initiating, adventuring, experimenting, dissolving. Its possessed powers, its accomplished unions with the world, are now reduced to uncertain agencies to be forged into efficient instrumentalities in the stress and strain of trial.
The individual, the self, centred in a settled world which owns and sponsors it, and which in turn it owns and enjoys, is finished, closed. Surrender of what is possessed, disowning of what supports one in secure ease, is involved in all inquiry and discovery; the latter implicate an individual still to make, with all the risks implied therein. For to arrive at new truth and vision is to alter. The old self is put off and the new self is only forming, and the form it finally takes will depend upon the unforeseeable result of an adventure. No one discovers a new world without forsaking an old one; and no one discovers a new world who exacts guarantee in advance for what it shall be, or who puts the act of discovery under bonds with respect to what the new world shall do to him when it comes into vision. This is the truth in the exaggeration of subjectivism. Only by identification with remaking the objects that now obtain are we saved from complacent objectivism. Those who do not fare forth and take the risks attendant upon the formation of new objects and the growth of a new self, are subjected perforce to inevitable change of the settled and close world they have made their own. Identification of the bias and preference of self hood with the process of intelligent remaking achieves an indestructible union of the instrumental and the final. For this bias can be satisfied no matter what the frustration of other desires and endeavors.
That an individual, possessed of some mode and degree of organized unity, participates in the genesis of every experienced situation, whether it be an object or an activity, is evident. That the way in which it is engaged affects the quality of the situation experienced is evident. That the way in which it is engaged has consequences that modify not merely the environment but which react to modify the active agent; that every form of life in the higher organisms constantly conserves some consequences of its prior experiences, is also evident. The constancy and pervasiveness of the operative presence of the self as a determining factor in all situations is the chief reason why we give so little heed to it; it is more intimate and omnipresent in experience than the air we breathe. Only in pathological cases, in delusions and insanities and social eccentricities, do we readily become aware of it; even in such cases it required long discipline to force attentive observation back upon the self. It is easier to attribute such things to invasion and possession from without, as by demons and devils. Yet till we understand operations of the self as the tool of tools, the means in all use of means, specifying its differential activities in their distinctive consequences in varying qualities of what is experienced, science is incomplete and the use made of it is at the mercy of an unknown factor, so that the ultimate and important consequence is in so far a matter of accident. Intentions and efforts bring forth the opposite of what was intended and striven for, and the result is confusion and catastrophe. Thus we are brought to a consideration of the psycho-physical mechanism and functioning of individual centres of action.
1 See Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man. Chapter VIII of this book seems to me to supply what is sound in the view of the French school alluded to, free from its exaggerations.
1 Early Civilization, pp. 407-8.