A Philosophy of the Real and the Possible 9780231877121

Citation preview

A

PHILOSOPHY OF T H E REAL

AND THE POSSIBLE

WOODBRIDGE DELIVERED A T

LECTURES

COLUMBIA

NUMBER

FOUR

UNIVERSITY

A PHILOSOPHY OF THE REAL AND THE POSSIBLE By Harry Todd Costello BROWNELL TRINITY

PROFESSOR

COLLEGE,

New York

OF

PHILOSOPHY

HARTFORD,

CONNECTICUT

1954

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

COPYRIGHT

1954

BY C O L U M B I A

UNIVERSITY

TRESS, NEW

P U B L I S H E D IN GREAT B R I T A I N , CANADA, INDIA, AND

BY

CEOFFREY

CUMBERLECE,

YORK

PAKISTAN

OXFORD UNIVERSITY

PRESS

LONDON, TORONTO, B O M B A Y , AND K A R A C H I

M A N U F A C T U R E D IN T H E UNITED STATES OF

AMERICA

L I B R A R Y OF CONCRESS CATALOC CARD N U M B E R :

54-6481

CONTENTS

1.

T H E SITUATION

3

2.

SYSTEMS

25

3.

PERCEPTIONS

48

4.

POSSIBILITIES

71

5.

VALUES

97

T H E N A T U R A L I S M OF FREDERICK WOODBRIDGE

124

Woodbridge Lectures

At his death in 1940 Professor Frederick Woodbridge left a bequest to Columbia University for the purpose of bringing distinguished philosophers to the University from time to time and for making their lectures available through publication. Some of Professor Woodbridge's friends made substantial additions to this bequest, and thus made it possible for the late President Butler to establish the Woodbridge Memorial Fund. T h e Woodbridge Lectures are delivered triennially. All these series have been published in book form by the Columbia University Press. 1. Wilmon H. Sheldon, Process and

Polarity

2. George Plimpton Adams, Man and

Metaphysics

3. Sterling Power Lamprecht, Nature and 4. Harry T o d d Costello, A Philosophy the Possible

History

of the Real

and

A PHILOSOPHY OF T H E REAL AND T H E POSSIBLE

i. THE SITUATION

I BELIEVE that, at its best, philosophy is a decidedly personal thing. The greatest thinkers and teachers in philosophy, as indeed in literature, art, and even science, always give a personal and characteristic quality to what they think. I agree with my old teacher, Professor Josiah Royce, that there is no insuperable difficulty in distinguishing this personal touch from the claim to objective truth in the substance of what is asserted by the philosopher. In this introduction to some ideas of my own about philosophy I may reminisce a bit and use the first personal pronoun, but I assure you it is not because of any feeling of conceit. It is an indication that my ideas have sources that are not infallible, and I know other people often differ with me on many points. I do not fear for myself any accusation of excess of originality, but I do run another risk. I am a Costello by birth and not by adoption. My father came from Limerick on the Shannon. And when I try to be serious, there is a certain tendency for cheerfulness to break through. Occasionally some solemn sourpuss thinks me just a little too facetious to be profound. I do not think that that is the main reason for my lack of profundity. I was shocked into seriousness for a moment recently when I visited an old, now state-supported, university of

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long tradition. Consulting the catalogue, I observed that the professor of philosophy at this university was like the professor of science at Königsberg University in Kant's time. It will be remembered that his j o b was to teach one science after another in successive terms until he had made the rounds. His modern American counterpart was teaching all the philosophy in a big university. I thumbed the catalogue further, and coming to the department of psychology I discovered that it rated a staff of ten members. Speaking to a professor of architecture, I remarked on the lack of balance and proportion here. I said I had found it in other American universities, though of course not in all. He replied that philosophy might in itself be made almost as interesting as psychology, but I must remember that psychology had an additional value as something very useful, and indeed essential, in filling the requirements of the education curriculum. T o this I found at the moment no adequate reply. I recall now an instance of which Professor Arthur Lovejoy had told me. David Starr Jordan, President of Stanford, great authority on fish, invited Lovejoy to come to Stanford and give a course or two on the history of philosophy. In so great a university, where all the newest sciences were being taught in their most modern form, Starr Jordan thought there ought to be someone who was recounting—briefly and strictly historically, of course—the long and pitiful story of the past intellectual errors of mankind. Hence a history of philosophy. I myself do not doubt that what Mr. Leland Stanford used to refer to as his wife's "monkey-box of professors" was improved even more than Starr Jordan foresaw by the addition of so able an exponent of error as Dr. Lovejoy. For the popular mind the philosopher is, as I think Dar-

THE SITUATION

5

win once said, one who generalizes and speculates "just as any fool can do." I once had a landlady who spoke of her admiration for James and Royce, those wonderful men who lived up the street, and added how she herself loved to "just sit and speculate and speculate." I changed my landlady. For the popular mind the philosopher is like those Baconian spinners of spider webs of thought in the Middle Ages, who inquired solemnly how many angels could dance on the point of a needle. Today, this strikes people as funny. Indeed, the illustration was considered funny in the Middle Ages. We would scorn to worry now, we think, about any such trivialities. But lying back of the absurd illustration is the great problem of individuation. Same sort of thing, same qualities, same time, same place, same motions —are there two things present or only one? T h e problem is serious enough to reappear in contemporary physics as the "exclusion principle" of Pauli, where it is not considered funny at all. People really get serious about it, perhaps even excited. T w o electrons in the same orbit, same quantum numbers—are there two or only one? T h e question is argued both experimentally and a priori. T h e experimental evidence I approve. Perhaps it is a new restatement of what was once called the impenetrability of matter—two bodies cannot occupy the same place at the same time. T h e a priori argument I feel doubtful about. Would it apply to quanta or photons? T h a t is a question for experiment. In challenging the a priori argument I am aware that I am not only challenging the medieval Franciscans of the Platonist tradition, and the "principle of identity of indiscernibles" of Leibniz, which I understand Pauli himself quotes, and challenging also a central thesis of the Hegelians, but I am also at odds with the positivist Symbolic Logicians.

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These nonbelievers in synthetic judgments a priori nevertheless base their development of the new definitions of number (the number i, the number 2) on a definition of identity which implies the a priori truth of the principle, "Numerical diversity involves qualitative diversity of predicates." " T w o angels on the point of a needle"—trivial indeed—that is, if you do not see the implications! I am not here concerned with arguing this question but with pointing out that we get real philosophical issues, "metaphysical" issues, not by going beyond the so-called answerable questions of science, but by deepening these same answerable questions themselves. One does not need to deny that "two plus two equals f o u r . " But one can go on to ask, "What is really meant by this?" J o h n Henry Cardinal Newman speaks of proving your proofs and analyzing your elements, "sinking further and further, and finding 'in the lowest depth a lower deep,' till you come to the broad bosom of skepticism." Much as I admire the rhetoric of this great passage from The Grammar of Assent, I do not agree with the conclusion at all. It is a question of levels in dealing with one and the same subject matter, and there is no reason why deeper depths of penetration should lead to skepticism. If you turn skeptic, it is because you have lost your road. Analytic philosophy is essentially deeper analysis. T h e r e are other meanings of philosophy. T h e r e is philosophy as the synoptic view. And there is philosophy as a way and standard of life, the last being, as Chesterton and William James agree, the most important matter to be pondered for " a landlady considering a lodger"—or, I would add, for a lodger considering a landlady. I shall not here have time to develop these other meanings. I think in the long run all three sorts of philosophy tend to coincide.

T H E SITUATION

7

Science is cumulative, philosophy is not. No philosophy ever succeeds in refuting another philosophy. A supposed refutation of Panpsychism or of Logical Positivism would merely compel the defenders of each view to restate it more profoundly, so as to meet the objections raised. That can always be done. In the long run there is a certain convergence of the different philosophies, which, however, does not center on any one of the philosophies with which we start. No, not even Hegelianism, that lion's cave where all the other animal tracks lead inwards but none come out again. "Philosophers," some people say, "cannot even tell you what question they are asking. It's a public scandal." The reply is that the questions you can answer with finality are not too much worth the asking. As for even science being cumulative, I think a good deal of that cumulation is superficial. The old science looks pretty bad after a while. Yet it sometimes takes a scientist a considerable time to realize what a queer world this is that he is trying to account for and what abysses yawn all the while beneath his feet. I was myself a late and minor product of that great Department of Philosophy at Harvard, whose quality Harvard managed with such success to get rid of, but which old and young Harvard men now still brag about. There were giants in those days. I can still see Royce with his red face and yellowish hair, see him in his yellow raincoat with gray cap over one ear, a gnome-like Mr. Jiggs figure. He used to seize me by the lapel like some Ancient Mariner and talk on for half an hour, trying to talk himself clear, and I would not even have a chance to say "yes." He was in later years failing slowly, as one could see, and there were insights in his philosophy of this period which never quite got written down. Those were the days when the early Pragmatists had for the

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THE SITUATION

moment talked themselves o u t in great verbal arguments about how to avoid verbalism. T h e six New Realists were coming into view. W e students were inclined to be very technical and narrow, b u t I think we were inspired by a wider vision than I seem to find in the present-day Positivists. We thought of the possibility of widening the categories of being and giving an answer to subjectivism in a new relational view of the world. Mind, said James, was one way in which the world was assembled and things p u t together, matter was another; b u t the stuff of the world was various and pluralistic, and wider than existence were the vast realms of possibility, providing room for creative synthesis. T h a t was what the New Realism meant to some of us and that was why we felt regret when the older fellows fell back into materialisms and subjectivisms. T h e coming man in those days seemed to be Bertrand Russell. Like Schelling, every year a new brand of philosophy! No settling back into the old harness and the old jog trot! Russell had started as a follower of Bradley and Hegel. As Radhakrishnan has said, "Every sinner has a future, and remember also, every saint has a past." So Russell, like John Dewey, had started out as an Hegelian. But he outgrew it— perhaps. T h e r e is always a "perhaps" when one has once been an Hegelian. Russell united with G. E. Moore to reach that rather novel stage of insight where the world seemed to be made of propositions. Some recent Positivists seem to have arrived there again, though now they talk of a world made of statements, that is, of sentences—rather dry nutriment. T h e Calculus of Propositions took shape for Russell with true and false propositions so symmetrically balanced that the reader was hard pressed to see why Russell should prefer the one to the other. Some of these propositions were

THE SITUATION

9

true and some false, eternally so, just as "some roses are red and some white." Mr. Santayana was to characterize Russell's early philosophy approvingly in The Winds of Doctrine as the new Rationalism, the new Platonism, the new Scholasticism. Even as we students looked, the picture changed. Royce said, " M r . Russell's truths are eternal truths, but you need the latest telegram to find out what is just now going on in eternity." T h i s evolution, in Russell's case, had some tendency to recapitulate the history of modern philosophy in reverse. Edwin Bissell Holt said of Russell: "What hopes we had of that man! We almost worshipped him like a god. And now look at him! He has turned into a damn subjectivist like Berkeley!" When I was Russell's assistant in a course at Harvard in 1914, he was so slender that he appeared tall. His mouth seemed to spread behind his ears when he laughed, so that you wondered if the top of his head were coming off. His quiet reticence set Royce to commenting on Englishmen in general and how pleasantly they contrasted with Theodore Roosevelt. "Englishmen find us too strident," said Royce. Royce also spoke of meeting Frazer of The Golden Bough, utterly unassuming in spite of his vast erudition. (I recall that among those present was one T . S. Eliot of St. Louis, who had just been reading all twelve volumes.) Royce added, " E v e n Jacks of Manchester College, that endless converser, never talks about himself. Germans can be very self-assertive, Harnack for instance; but with Wundt it was always self-effacement, die Sache selbst, and Lotze was constitutionally timid." I wish I had recorded more details about Russell in my notebooks at this time. But Professor Raphael Demos's comment about him—that when Russell came in, the whole room seemed to light up—is a pardon-

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THE SITUATION

able hyperbole. Demos, at a first tea that Russell gave his students, tried to make conversation by asking Russell who he thought was "the second greatest philosopher now living." Russell enjoyed the joke but replied, "Well, I don't know who is the second greatest, but I think that the greatest is Frege, the mathematician." At the time Russell was developing his theory of perspectives, and he also had everyone studying Frege's Foundations of Arithmetic. His own new man of ideas, however, was a certain Ludwig Wittgenstein, son of a high official in the Austrian steel trust. Wittgenstein seemed to be an enigma to Russell, both personally and in his very original ideas. I have heard an anecdote that Wittgenstein, while staying at Russell's home one night, tramped back and forth, keeping Russell awake. Russell asked the reason. Wittgenstein said he was trying to decide whether to commit suicide or not. Russell said, "Well, hurry and make up your mind, for I want to get some sleep." Russell relates in a recent number of Mind (July, 1 9 5 1 ) that he was in doubt as to whether the man was a genius or a crank. He asked G. E. Moore, who replied, " I think very highly of him indeed. He is the only man in my audience who looks puzzled when I lecture on philosophy." Russell adds, "Getting to know Wittgenstein was one of the most exciting intellectual adventures of my life." I myself knew Wittgenstein only through Russell. Others have described him to me as a big handsome man, eccentric in dress and action, and a most annoying critic of opinions uttered in his presence. T o me the posthumous volume, Philosophical Investigations (1953), is highly disappointing, a queer introspective 'semantic" psychology, argued only by a piling up of rhetorical questions.

THE SITUATION I must confess that it was not until I was preparing to write these Woodbridge lectures that I read the famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in 1922, written in its essentials, I would say, before the First World War. I do not know why I put it off. I had known Wittgenstein through what Russell had said, and through some pages of unpublished manuscript which Russell lent me and which I copied. Reading the Tractatus recently, I found it like something I was remembering. I was not so perplexed as I undoubtedly ought to have been. In the old days he did not make me his disciple. I bounced off at right-angles to the line of pressure. But he did start me on new lines of thought. I think what I got from Wittgenstein was different from what anyone else got. Possibly I was quite wrong in the way I interpreted him. An absent-minded professor, I love to read Kant or listen to a symphony and in the middle of it go off into a line of thought which makes me oblivious to sight or sound. My own thoughts took over when I read what Wittgenstein wrote in 1 9 1 3 : "Facts can not be named. So propositions are not names of facts. We must be able to understand a proposition without knowing whether it is true or false. When we understand a proposition, what we know is this: 'We know what is the case if it is true, what is the case if it is false.' But we do not necessarily know if it is actually true or false." Like a flash the thought came to me: "Subjunctive mood. In every proposition we ask: What would be the case if it were true? Mind deals with possibilities before it can deal with actualities. T h a t is the nature of the mind as thinking, not as perceiving. Mind deals with meanings. T h a t also is the nature of mind, for meanings are possibilities. How is the knowledge of possibilities possible?"

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Everyone else reading the same passage seems to have said: " W h a t is the case? T h a t is the important t h i n g ! " And so Russell wrote that if we had a complete list of all the facts that "are the case," we should then have a complete account of the world. Yes, I said to myself, a complete account of everything except mind. M i n d somehow is not satisfied with what is. It seeks meanings as an ideal background of the actual. Somebody once remarked of Russell that whenever a new thought came to him, he believed it was a new discovery of the human race. Nobody allowed me any such conceit. W h e n I mention such ideas, somebody would promptly tell me I was talking nonsense. I was quick to realize that when I used the word "possibility" it stood for a possible four or five different things, and that when I used it in one sense, somebody usually replied in another. Not here to continue further this line of thought, let us return to Wittgenstein. H e began his exposition in this way: "Frege said, 'Propositions are names.' Russell said, 'Propositions correspond to complexes.' Both are false. Especially false is the statement, 'Propositions are the names of complexes.' " He added: "Every proposition has two poles, the case of its truth and the case of its falsity. W e call this the sense of the proposition. T h e meaning of the proposition is the fact which actually corresponds to it." By sense he here means the intension (Frege's Sinn); by meaning, the denotation ( B e d e u t u n g ) . H e says, " T h e chief characteristic of my theory is: the proposition and its contradictory have the same corresponding fact." W e may think that in a sentence we have stated or need to state only the truthclaiming pole, but Wittgenstein held that both poles are there. A not reverses the polarity of our proposition, two

T H E SITUATION

i3

nots reverse the polarity twice, and we are back where we started. If a proposition were not distinct from the fact that makes it true, we could never be wrong. " W e can," said Wittgenstein, "understand propositions without knowing whether they are true or false." A proposition can be expressed in various sentences and in various languages. We might compare a proposition to a check drawn on the bank of factual reality, a check that may or may not "bounce." One can draw up the check without having yet met the particular dollars which will cash it. Truth is a relation; it is not a quality which is contained within the four corners of the proposition itself. In this sense there can be no a priori truths, although there might possibly be such in some other sense. I have a further question. Consider a statement such as, " T h e book is on the table," or, as Russell might prefer, "A blue bookoidal patch seems to be on the brown patch." Russell said that this latter was so true that it had no contradictory and was not a proposition. T o me it seems that you might make the statement a moment before you looked as well as at some moment after. Furthermore, suppose when I look the book is not there. Both Russell and Wittgenstein would hold that I had observed and could truly report a negative fact by the sentence, " T h e book is not on the table." I contend that I may indeed see the table and also see the book not far off, but how can I observe the relation of being upon when it is not there to be reported? T h e relation in question is not doing any relating, and what is a relation that does not relate? Russell formerly said that relations can relate negatively or a property can be ascribed negatively to an object. This is rather appalling, for it implies that everything in the world is related to everything

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else by every possible relation, mostly negatively, of course. Every object has every possible quality, mostly negatively. When the relation is quantitative, for example, Chicago is not a quarter of a mile, and not a mile, and not a mile and seventeen yards, and not millions of other distances from the Statue of Liberty—are these all real negative facts in the world? Such a world is a clutter and a mess! " N o w look here," you say, "what is all this logic chopping? Surely I can see directly that the book is not on the table. Aren't you that blind fellow in the dark room who was looking for the black cat that was not there?" Not at all. It is you, and the Logical Positivists, and Russell, and certain other "theologians" who gaze entrancedly at a black cat that is not there to be seen. It is you who are claiming to see directly something that is not. Next you will be seeing Harvey, the notorious rabbit, or perhaps that famous little man who was not there, and you will end up by wailing, "Oh, how I wish he'd go away!" Alice said, " I see nobody down the road," and the King replied, "I wish I had eyes like yours." I was merely considering the meaning of any very simple negative statement and how it could be tested. Do not blame me if I find a puzzle! As Mr. John Wisdom has remarked, "A philosopher is that peculiar sort of person who gets puzzled by the obvious." It suddenly ceases to be obvious. We shall continue this later. There is still another puzzle about this famous question, "What can we directly observe?" One famous answer is that we can observe directly only our own ideas. Another is the claim that with the senses we can observe behavior, the reactions of organisms in an objective world, for which the charming word "transactions" has recently come into use. If we act across or "transact," we obviously are not shut within

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ourselves. It seems to be the view of some, however, that we know directly only our own ideas even about transactions. This again slams shut that door into the outer world which behaviorism had half-opened. Always we would like to insure that the door into the outer world is left ajar, even if only just a little. How did the door ever get closed? I recall the first college course that I took used as its text The Philosophy of English Literature by John Bascom. In the last chapter, which my venerable English literature professor never reached in that particular course, I read for myself the familiar story of the development of epistemology from Locke to Hume. I eagerly read more of it in Thomas Huxley's little book on Hume. There were great names mentioned—Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. Later I was to hear George Santayana say, "These men were in their own day living, breathing human beings, full of plans and hopes and fears. But what do we do? We line them up and diagram them, and turn them from flesh and blood into being mere phases in the development of the epistemological problem." But the epistemological problem interested me, and I had met it before. My high-school physics teacher had pictured Niagara, the great waters tumbling for ages into the abyss below—silently. Then one day a lone Indian made his way through the underbrush of the primeval forest. The great cataract broke into a terrific roar, which seemed to fill and shake heaven and earth. T h e roar, it turned out, was situated entirely in the head of the Indian. The sunlit emerald-green waters were flecked white with foam. These marvelous colors were also only in the head of the Indian. I had been impressed then, I remember, even dismayed. As Hume said about Berkeley, the argument was unanswerable

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and produced no conviction, and, as H u m e added, the very essence of skepticism was in it. By arguments based, at every step, on the facts of the external world, we can prove there is no external world. It is not even inside the Indian's head. We can take everything and carry it inside the head, including the head itself—we crawl into a hole and pull the hole in after us. Suppose that accomplished, now what next? T h e world inside is outside the head that is inside, and the whole thing starts all over again. I once expressed the situation in the Journal of Philosophy (1948) in the following words: " I come into a philosophers' meeting. I see them nod to one another across the room and smile, as they take their seats. T h e n there is a hush, as the chairman introduces the speaker. He rises and pulls out a paper. T h e paper is to the effect that all this scene is being done with mirrors or radar. Unlike the Lady of Shalott, we have not even the possibility of turning away from our several mirrors, and looking through space at one another. Like a delegate at a United Nations meeting, we listen only to our own private translator. Each of us lives in his individual Platonic cave, up in his brain-cells somewhere, from which he can only make exit by the power of conceptual thought. And so the speaker drones on past his twenty minute limit. Everybody listens solemnly, and nods approval to his neighbor. And I say to myself, 'There is something goofy about all this.' " Nay, the situation is even worse. T h e television mirrors are the only reality. There is nothing they reflect. May I quote again from another paper written for the Journal of Philosophy (1950): "Bertrand Russell speaks of the operation of the surgeon on a patient's brain, and explains that

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the gray substance and the gleam of the knife are in the surgeon's own brain. But he goes the atomists one better, metaphysically speaking, and where you w o u l d be expecting h i m to say that there are only atoms and the void in the region where the surgeon is operating, that is, in the head of the patient, Russell explains that really what could be at that place are only the thoughts of the patient, and even these are absent for the moment, due to the anaesthetic. In fact, there is not even the head of the patient situated in three-dimensional 'real' space, for such space is itself only an imaginary construct. T h e operation was a success, but the patient disappeared. Russell is q u o t e d as saying, I intend really to be much less subjective than I sound.' " Meanwhile, as this line of thought is mercilessly carried out by Berkeley, by Russell, and by others, we innocent bystanders are in a woeful plight. W e do not even have our Indian left. T h e Positivists and Pragmatists at this point say that our unhappy dilemma exists because we are talking the phenomenalist language. If we talk the physicalist language, we then shall have organisms in an environment and can go on transacting transactions. T h i s seems to m e like saying we have made a nice mess of it speaking English. Let us sidestep the whole thing by speaking French. Russell's feigned space will then turn into real space. Surely the question is not to be solved by changing o u r language. N o r is it solved merely by taking a physicalist, so-called objectivist point of view, for there are arguments, strong arguments, by which careful thinkers have concluded that we each have our own conscious thoughts that nobody else can share. W h e n we verify, they say, it is a private verification. I talk to you. B u t

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what is that? I am shaking the air back and forth. If you get any thoughts out of that, you must surely invent them all inside yourself. T h e causes of the simplest sense impression that you or I possess must be, physically speaking, very complex. But these are the things we are told we are surest of, these sense impressions, these sense data. Mach and James both said that if we put our data in one arrangement we have mind; if in another, we have matter, the material world. Russell says he got this analysis out of James; he also says that one sense datum knows another, and that this is the nature of knowledge. T h i s is said to be New Realism, American style. T h e r e is a considerable misunderstanding here, I feel sure. I admit that in his essay, Does Consciousness Exist?, James hints that when we think a tree, it is the identical tree which is on the street. T h e tree, be it noted, and not some "treeoid spot." James, in his Principles of Psychology, denied the analysis of mind into atoms as done by Mach and Russell. He was considering not just a sense language and a thing language but also what they both were about. Let us, however, leave these considerations, and determine whether a behaviorism that ignores mental states can give an adequate account, assuming that behavior is objectively observable, being bodily motions. I think very highly of behaviorism as a branch of psychology. It says, however, I take it, that we can look out at bodies behaving in certain ways and see all there is to be seen of mind. Such a view has been eloquently expounded by Professor Gilbert R y l e in his able book, The Concept of Mind (1949). A rather slurring description of behaviorism calls it a "rat's-eye view" of the world. Behaviorism arrived along with animal psychology. Animals cannot speak and tell us

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what they are thinking. T o scientifically determine the thoughts of a dog, Pavlov developed the conditioned reflex method. T h e flow of the dog's saliva told him when the dog was thinking about food. By first showing a color to a dog just before food is given, we can, after a while, cause the dog's saliva to flow even though we withhold the food and just show him the color. We can also find out he is colorblind by noting that he reacts the same way to any color. We can tell what he is, in popular language, thinking about, although behaviorism is a psychology without thoughts. Similar experiments have been tried on white rats, human beings, and other fauna. In human beings there are further reactions called language, a Mickey Mouse stage, behavior plus squeaks. Mr. Ryle, in his book, assembles a surprising collection of squeaks, for his vocabulary describing emotionally colored and impulse-tinged reactions is rich, even exuberant. Let us consider seriously the extent to which mind is objectively to be observed as behavior. I can know a friend so well that his narrowed eyes, a twist of the mouth, a slight shrug of the shoulders could convey to me his judgment on some matter before us, even without his intending it. But what I conclude is more than just what I observe. My observation needs to be interpreted. Experiments in the interpretation of emotions have shown that a skilled actor can convey so well certain emotions that observers can name, with considerable correctness, the emotion that was intended at any one time. On the other hand, candid-camera shots of people actually experiencing these same emotions produced no unanimity of interpretation among the observers. They could not distinguish between actual surprise and fear, love and a stomach-ache. T h e actor's feigning

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turned out to be clearly an artificial language, understood because conventional. People's actual behavior could not be so easily interpreted. I recall Professor Santayana saying, in substance, that the great executive, keen judge of men, could size u p a person standing before him almost at a glance and that he did it by noting betraying gestures and tones of voice. T h e executive cared not a whit for what mental pictures might be passing through the consciousness of his trembling victim. T h i s ability has also been tested. Skilled personnel men have tried, under well-controlled experimental conditions, to size u p people in personal interviews. T h e y were wrong surprisingly often. T h e traits they depended on were not diagnostic. Yet these judges of men thought they were doing a very adequate job, and they had the advantage of being able to ask questions and get answers. T h e assumption that language is mere behavior is something we are going to discuss later. W e may admit that a man can be judged more accurately at times by others than by himself, but this is merely an evidence of his own powers of selfdeception. Given a considerable a m o u n t of experience with people, we may judge about them with some accuracy. W e even judge the personalities of our cats and dogs. I recently heard of a litter of dogs, each of whom had his own distinct character out of the ordinary, and each seemed to know how good he was. T h e one ordinary dog in the litter knew it too, and developed a clear case of pathological inferiority complex from knowing he was just a plain average m u t t . We respond to the emotions of others, not necessarily with the same, but with a complementary and appropriate, emotion,

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often without a word passing between us, and it must somehow be done by observing behavior. Even a baby in its first year seems to know what is wrong with the family. There is here some interpretation of signs, some construction to be tested. When we interpret the meanings of signs, there are at least three kinds of signs, to use Charles Peirce's classification in Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology. A sign may be like a pointing finger, an index. Or it may be like a map or picture, indicating its reference through its likeness, an ikon. This involves some recognition of universal, and it may be pointing also does in actual practice— try to point something out to a dog. Gesture language combines both these first two kinds of signs. But real language is essentially concepts of universals. It uses words which are what Peirce calls symbols, and the relation in this case is arbitrary; d-o-g spells 'dog,' but the child is wrong who supposes the little curl on the end of the g is the dog's tail. This arbitrariness gives to the spoken and written word its tremendous flexibility. Just because of this arbitrariness the word and its meaning are two, and not essentially related. The meaning is a free concept, a universal, capable of development on its own. Sentences as such are not language. No mere direct observation of the language can reveal the meaning—otherwise we might all understand Chinese at the first hearing. It is therefore intrinsically unlikely that language proper is a simple case of behavior. The thought comes so freely when we see or hear familiar words that we think it is conveyed directly by our senses, as Ryle appears to assume. What we actually observe are black marks on paper. Yet, from them come thrilling stories of great deeds!

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W e actually experience vibrations in the air, and yet are transported by them to faraway lands. Behavior yes, b u t something more. Some of our modern semantic philosophers think they are talking about language when they are only talking about names. Names are physical, they are bodily reactions to things. Names as such are not language. T h e child babbles a thousand sounds. Accidentally she says " M a m a , " and everyone greets this with great enthusiasm. So she tries it again. In the course of time, with the aid of bystanders' applause or indifference, she gets a certain n u m b e r of names sorted out. T h e thermostat feels the breath of cold air and says " c l i c k . " T h e dog sees the cat and barks. T h e little girl sees the cat and says "Pussy." T h a t is not language yet. It is purely a conditioned reflex. Someday the little girl will say "Pussy?" with a questioning inflection, when there is n o pussy around. And then at last she will really be talking. Why? Because it is a possible pussy, and not a real one, at that moment. Language, said Wittgenstein, deals with what "would be the case." It is "Pussy" with a question mark. You do not really observe language. As Professor Royce said, you interpret it, which is a very different thing. Interpretation is not overt physical behavior. Its relation to sights and sounds is often quite arbitrary. T h r o u g h it, in every judgment you make and in every proposition you frame, you build a construction, you shape a hypothesis. T h r o u g h it you come to rethink and appreciate the hidden thoughts of another mind. Besides observing emotions and language meanings, we can, according to Professor Ryle, directly observe whether behavior is intelligent or not. John Dewey might hold the same. Again I do not think this is so. W e might ask which is

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the more intelligent, the bee that persists in banging its head against the window pane, or the fly that goes crazily hither and thither? The fly gets out first. Is the fly therefore more intelligent? People argue this sort of thing endlessly. I have seen machines behaving in a manner that would cause me to ascribe intelligence to them if I did not know better. Fabre describes the spider producing out of the same spinnerets different sorts of cable. Intelligence here? No. Fabre's spiders were quite stupid. They made no effort at repairs. Other spiders may do repairs. But for a case of real intelligence, note the mind of a Fabre or a Ryle, looking at such a sample of animal behavior, for instance a web repair, and trying to determine whether this sample has been a display of intelligence. Why? Because such an observer of behavior must go on to consider the possible alternatives, balancing hypothesis against hypothesis. In short, we have intelligence when we have imagination and consideration of possibilities, and not merely when something clever is done. A young friend of mine, aged six, was listening to his still younger sister complain that parents just are not fair to the younger generation. He said, "Peggy, have you ever stopped to think where you would be if you had never had any father and mother?" Franklin D. Roosevelt would have called this question an "iffy" question. T h e classic example is the question, "Does your little brother like cheese?" which drew the answer, " I don't have any little brother." "Yes, but if you did have a little brother, would he like cheese?" Some inquiries into hypothetical cases are indeed too "iffy." You have to be intelligent to ask good "iffy" questions. In fact, doing that is intelligence. I seem to remember, that when Roosevelt said, "That's iffy," it was the

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politician's trick for side-stepping some very searching queries put by the Washington correspondents. Philosophers who would otherwise be at the opposite poles have nevertheless united to minimize the category of the possible. T h e Absolute Idealists, from Hegel to Bosanquet, have dismissed the possible as only our imperfect insight into the richness of the actual. Josiah Royce was one of the few exceptions, and it was one reason why he felt closer to Fichte's Voluntarism than to Hegel's Absolutism. Royce has been accused of not holding a philosophy self-consistent in all its parts. Yes, he wanted the Absolute, but not the block-universe. H e also wanted possibilities, he wanted an intelligently ordered world. At the other pole the Positivists reduce everything to that which is verifiable by senseperception. So they have admitted the possible only as an odd and casual problem, coming up under such names as "contrary-to-fact conditionals" and "dispositional predicates." As Russell put it, for the empiricist the possible must always somewhere be real. Otherwise how could an empiricist "verify" it by observation? Somebody must drink out of the bottle labeled " p o i s o n " to verify the label. T o which my reply would be, " Y o u r turn first, my dear empiricist." So it would seem that "possibility" is not among the empirical possibilities. Philosophers unite to condemn "iffyness," and as one of my former students put it, " W h i c h e v e r way you turn, they think they have you by the horns." W e shall see.

2. SYSTEMS

I N T H E LAST CHAPTER I tried to suggest certain problems concerning perceptions, possibilities, negative facts. A writer or speaker is never sure how successfully he has put his ideas across. Many of the things I shall now discuss were fairly familiar even forty years ago, and I hope they will not be too unintelligible to those whose interests are not along these lines. I remember how, years ago, my old Sundayschool teacher, a highly intelligent woman, went to hear Professor Josiah Royce lecture on Pragmatism. She said to me afterwards, " I was never so dumbflustered in my life. He was using the simplest words, but it was the way he was putting them together!" Yet, on another occasion, a woman came up to Royce after the lecture to compliment him, "What you said today is something I have always believed all my life." Royce replied, "I'm sorry; why didn't you come years ago and save me the heavy task of thinking it out again?" When Royce was in Scotland for his Gifford Lectures he was invited to speak before the local Philosophy Club, and read a paper which he had at hand, full of his usual "hereupons" and "preciselys." When he finished the chairman asked for comments. T h e r e was an almost painful silence. Finally a little Scotsman off in the corner spoke up in a high-pitched voice, " I have been thinking over what

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the visiting gentleman has said, and I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing in it." For the followers of the old-line schools of philosophy a troubling apparition has of late years come across the philosophical horizon. Not only has Symbolic Logic appeared, with warnings that he who does not understand it should consider himself obsolete, but it seems to use such odd-looking symbols. And each new writer aspires to invent a new symbolism all his own. As the ordinary philosopher ventures to peer within the covers of the Principia Mathematica of Whitehead and Russell, he is struck by pages covered with marks that look like hentracks in the snow on a cold winter's morning. He learns that these are the foundations of mathematics, far down below even the multiplication table itself. He observes that the number 1 arrives on a page numbered 347; and that after 46 plus 674 pages in the first volume, the number 2 does not seem to be altogether safely launched as " E upside down shriek 2" until we have gone some 53 pages into volume two; or 773 pages total, to reach the number 2! The second volume stretches 31 plus 742 pages in a discussion which is continued in a shorter, third volume of a mere 8 plus 491 pages. He then hears rumors that the authors themselves collapsed in the face of volume four. He is a bit dismayed concerning what all this might mean for philosophy. He begins to wonder whether he himself is existing upside down or right side up. Perhaps the prophet Isaiah may have had something like this in mind when he warned us, "There shall come men who speak with a stammering tongue, and they shall carry thee whither thou wouldst not go." I began my study of Symbolic Logic before the publication of the Principia, by taking Josiah Royce's logic course.

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Royce used to quote Charles Peirce as his catalyst. Peirce had written to Royce, " R o y c e , you ought to study logic. Y o u need it so m u c h . " I was myself born too soon. A l l that most philosophers seemed to know about Symbolic Logic in those days was that there was nothing in it. I certainly found I could not make a living by teaching it. Besides I was a philosopher and wanted to explain in ordinary language what Symbolic Logic was all about. T h e Symbolic Logicians themselves agreed that this was not proper. It was like a revelation of trade secrets. T h o s e who made a real success of the subject were scientists, w h o doggedly developed it step by step. T o d a y I am still an outsider to the genuine fraternity of Symbolic Logicians. I feel as former President T r u m a n , an amateur pianist, might feel with respect to Petrillo's musicians' union. Symbolic Logic is an extensional calculus. It lives in a world of atoms—atomic individuals—and really nothing else in addition but groups of these. A b o u t these it utters statements. T h e statements consist of the names of atomic individuals plus their predicates. Symbolic Logic puts these names and predicates together in almost all possible combinations and labels the resulting statements true or false. T h i s is called the Calculus of Propositions. A l l the relations (such as i f , and, or) among statements or propositions can seemingly be reduced to one relation—such as Dr. Sheffer's stroke-relation. W e can build u p edifices of these relations, which look imposing, as those on the early pages of the Principia. But when we substitute back the values into these complexes, the whole pile often collapses like a house of cards. But is not this collapse itself an illusion? A l t h o u g h we have destroyed the construction and have left only a pile of cards, that does not prove there was no architecture there. If

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we wish to handle qualities, we may make a calculus of them, in intension so called, but this also is considered really an extensional piling up of little round isolated concepts. It is all atomic and nominalistic. We may have to refer to qualities or predicates at times in the regular calculus, but these are just like the black and the white on chessmen—they tell one side from the other but are not part of the game. Even "classes" of individuals are too metaphysical. We are told that deductions are substitutions, and that the language in which logic speaks is a language that says the same thing over again in many ways. W e are told that what it says is "vacuous." T r u e and false statements are so symmetrical that we could reverse them and notice but little difference. Some statements are true and some are false, as some roses are red and some are white. T r u t h is an internal property of statements. I have no objection to the development of such a calculus, purely extensional. T h a t is, I would have no objection if the philosophers who fed on it did not suddenly announce that this was a complete account of the world. T h e y say that the number 2, for instance, is the collection of all the pairs of things. One defines " p a i r " without mentioning 2, though not without mentioning "identity." This last seems to involve a large collection of identical predicates, as if the individual were the sum of its predicates, which latter assumption happens to be metaphysics, and rather troublesome in itself, but let us let that point go. Likewise, for this extensional logic, monogamous marriage is the collection of all the ordered pairs, husband and wife, husband and wife—disregarding a disorderly bit of lunatic fringe, which may or may not belong. Marriage is all the pairs, hus-

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band and wife. Therefore, marriage is quite literally a proper part of the number 2. How queer! " L o g i c is a great tautology," Wittgenstein said. Russell, in the old days, had waxed enthusiastic about a new logic, just appearing on the horizon, which was to get us away from the old subject-predicate logic, " A has quality B , " of Aristotle. W e were to have a new logic, a logic of relations, that Aristotle never dreamed of. It would open up new possibilities. T o me, at the time, this was the main appeal of the new logic, a new relational account of the world. But today the relations have disappeared, except as predicates of the terms related, or as the sets of things spoken of as related. T h e new logic seems to be a substance and accident logic, just like medieval Aristotelianism but somewhat bleached out. T h e world is made of little atoms (call them x's or a's and b's), each with its accidental predicates. This is enunciated in "protocol" propositions, based on atomic observations, in sentences like " T h e rose is red." We build up structures, not of the atoms, but of the protocol propositions, unchanging building blocks of knowledge, with no real mortar between them. Just what has happened to my relational view of the world? T h a t hope was only a dream. It was, I am told, metaphysics, and therefore nonsense. A relation does not connect things; it is just a group of things. T h e relation of inclusion is nothing but the pairs of things that are outside and inside, or reputed to be so. People conventionally think that there are things tied together by a vast array of varying relations, but really "there are only atoms and the void," and a lot of short sentences made of words. T h e systems we may make of sentences are only tautologies. Deductions are just the finding of new sentences for old. I

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verily believe this new logic is a science of stuttering. Bennett Cerf tells us of the small boy who was asked what it would mean to him if somebody said, " A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose." He thought for a moment and then replied, "Whiskey." Gertrude Stein or Wittgenstein, we must not be too hard on them, but the principle of tautology is surely a rather meager basis for all the relatedness and organization of the world. Symbolic Logic itself has grown into a science for which I have the highest respect, the work of men like Sheffer and C. I. Lewis, Alonzo Church, Quine, Carnap, Godel, the Polish logicians, a long list. It is even now the present stage of a tradition, not merely of Boole a century ago trying to use mathematics to solve problems in logic, but of a long line of mathematicians arithmetizing all mathematics. They all were governed by ideals of taking nothing for granted and of developing an absolute rigor of proof. Royce may not always have been too precise a thinker himself, but he admired this sort of precision. He considered it a new level of moral honesty or intellectual conscience. In the eighteenth century nothing had really been proved in the whole of mathematics, even by a Newton or an Euler. In the nineteenth century came Weierstrass, Dedekind, Cantor, and others, then on to the logicians Peano and Frege. Intuitions were considered tricky. One could take only very short steps and make no leaps. Geometry books were written with no space diagrams that might mislead the readers. Everything was translated into a new set of unfamiliar symbols, so that the connotations of old familiar symbols should not carry one astray. Russell used to say he often wanted to make errors in his own thinking, but his symbolism would not let him. Each step of proof stood gaunt but solid.

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I took Royce's course forty and more years ago, and I recall that Royce said then that there was a more fundamental science than the logic which is the science of thought. Still less was it a science of symbols and words. He denied there was any force in the notion that you had to begin with some calculus of propositions, just because you used propositions to express what you wanted to say. What you wanted to say was simpler than propositions. Mathematics and chemistry prospered when they got a good symbolism, but they themselves were not about symbols. A technical language may be a hindrance. In general you clear up your language by first clearing up your thoughts. You clear up your thoughts by sharpening your ideas on a real subject matter. You make technical distinctions as your subject matter forces you to make them. Someone once asked Professor Whitehead, "Why don't you write clearer?" With cherubic smile and charming naïveté Whitehead replied, " I can't. I don't think any clearer." In the days when I listened to Royce, it was the logomachies and confused futilities of the then current controversies about Pragmatism, the new proposal of that day for making our ideas clear, that left us convinced that language, as such, must not run too far ahead of thought and subject matter. Words are not self-refining, unless you have something solid on which to whet their sharpness. It seemed to me then, as it did to Royce, that there was a fundamental logic, deeper than the logic of thinking, deeper than verbal syntax. It was a logic whose subject matter was neither thought nor symbols. T h e "science of order," Royce called it, but it was also a generalized science of objective relations and structures, systems and organizations. Thought has a structure, too, but applying logic to

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thought is to enter on one sort of applied logic. W e can make a machine that will grind out the conclusions of syllogisms, or make substitutions of equivalents, or play with tautologies. T h e machine is not doing any thinking, it is a sort of embodied mechanics. T h e reason for its usefulness is that the structure of the machine parallels the structure of our syllogisms, and our syllogisms or other deductions parallel the structure of objective systems. More fundamental for thought is the possibility of skipped intermediaries, owing to the fact that certain relations found outside thought are transitive. If A is inside B and B inside C, then A must also be inside C. T h i s holds for wooden boxes as well as for thoughts about boxes. W h e t h e r this general science should properly be called "logic" is another matter. It is true that the word "logic" has been historically confined to the rules of "correct thinking." Some n a m e like "morphology" would be better, if the zoologists had not appropriated it to lesser uses. When as a student I read Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen, the first part, in which he makes a sharp distinction between logic and psychology, seemed obvious to me. But the rest of his book, though not recognizable psychology, seemed to be about forms of thinking, rather than about a general science of form. T o me then, it would have been a step backward to start with a science of thinking, still more so with a science of verbal symbols. This would be a confused nominalist medievalism. I think I am still largely of the same opinion. Aristotle himself had a sense of dealing with realities; but this stuff, a science of symbols and syntax, is sheer verbalism. In Royce's course I learned how the series of the whole

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numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on, had been expanded into new sorts of numbers, which derived their validity from the validity of the operations made upon the series of the whole numbers. From the other end mathematicians had shown, for the great realms of mathematics, how the validity of geometry or function theory depended on the soundness of simple arithmetic, or on something even simpler, like group theory. Mathematics might be applied to quantity or to space, because these were matter for mathematical form. A science of geometry does not need to specify it is about points, or sets of three numbers, such as replace points in analytic geometry, or angels in choirs. A geometry is a general system of ordered things. Such a geometry has no use for space, except as a sample of how that geometry can be applied. Such a geometry is just a peculiar type of order. T o apply numbers to space measurements, we need a unit of length, and the laying down of the unit a certain number of times like a yardstick, which involves use of a rigid body. Royce talked cheerfully about a jellyfish, which would presumably have bulk without being able to measure length, for there would be no rigid bodies in its world. But let us not be too hasty in our assumptions, for we are reminded also of Helmholtz and his little man in the doorknob. I measure the big straight room with a big straight ruler. Simultaneously the little man, who is my reflection in the doorknob, measures his little crooked room with a little crooked ruler that changes shape and size with every motion he makes. But the little man with the little crooked ruler gets exactly the same results that I do. Who said rigid bodies were necessary for measurement? Both of us, the little man and I, have perhaps a length left over, which is only a part

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of a unit, a fractional length, and we record it by putting down a pair of numbers, a fraction. From where do we derive that pair of numbers? First we started with the whole numbers. T h e y were not created by counting, but were applied in counting, said Royce. Some, like Leopold Kroneker, have said G o d gave them to us, and what we did with them later was our business, not His. T h i s is like arguing that God gave us sun time, and we then devised Eastern standard; or God gave us Eastern standard, and the Devil helped us develop daylightsaving time, as one Connecticut farmer once hinted at before the state legislature. Anyhow, in early modern times a need had been felt to use positive and negative numbers, although some considered this meaningless. "What is the number," they asked, "which is smaller than nothing at all?" Unfortunately, in the world of today, we are made only too familiar with things smaller than nothing, including debts exceeding our assets, and temperatures below zero. So zero as a number, and numbers below zero became familiar, as a mere result of subtraction. T h a t is, we made a new series of "plus" and " m i n u s " numbers. We did not simply add the minus numbers to the old series. We made a new construction. We made still another new construction. In division we found such situations as the problem of dividing a three unit length into five parts. Not having any way to name the result, we just wrote 3 over 5, and let it go at that. A n d so we constructed fractions, as being pairs of numbers. We call these pairs of numbers "rational numbers." It was found, in the long run, that we could work with the series of fractions without thinking of them as quantitative lengths, but just as pairs of numbers. We could arrange them in an

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order of size, by placing the pairs so that the denominator of the first pair m u l t i p l i e d by the numerator of the second pair was larger than the other numerator multiplied by the other denominator. W e could reduce these to a linear series by eliminating such pairs as 2 over 4 in favor of 1 over 2, thus reducing to lowest terms. W e f o u n d that w h e n we had them in the order of size, between any two fractions there was a possible third. T h e r e f o r e no two fractions were really n e x t to next, and we called such a series a dense series. T h i s series was all new, a brand-new construction; for 1, 2, 3, were not in this series, b u t only 1 over 1, 2 over 1, 3 over 1. Such a dense series had an infinite n u m b e r of members between any two members, although they could be rearranged in a single row. T h i s infinity made these so-called rational numbers seem to some people, w h o dislike the infinite, a highly irrational extension of the n u m b e r concept. B u t we needed fractions so m u c h that these people got ignored. Aristotle presumably wrote or assembled his book, Physics, late in life, and he was not naturally mathematical. B u t he may have been q u o t i n g from one of his old notebooks from some seminar in Plato's A c a d e m y , where there were mathematicians of great ability. H e said, in his Physics, that w h e n you start to move, either there is n o last moment of rest, or else no first m o m e n t of motion. Zeno the Eleatic also had said simply, " I f you want to go somewhere, you have to go halfway first." H e n c e we note that if we want to g o halfway, we have to begin by g o i n g half of that. In short, to go anywhere we must go somewhere else first. W e are c o m i n g into an infinite series from the b i g end, the infinite end. W e have to make an infinity of preparations before getting started, and therefore we can never start and certainly never arrive. Fractions in the hands of Zeno were be-

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ginning to do tricks. T r y i n g to avoid this by limiting arbitrarily the number of places and times in the series to a finite number, we can indeed then go to the next place at the next time. T h i s looks good until we note that we can only move with one speed. T o go slower is to stop; to move faster is to jump. This, too, is not so good. But there were other difficulties with fractions. T h e Pythagoreans had discovered, in one of the most famous of ancient paradoxes, the incommensurable lengths. Thought could show that these existed, although the senses never could. Hence Plato recommended their consideration as an indispensable revelation for all thinking men and as proof of the inadequacy of the senses. You recall, of course, the Pythagorean theorem, " T h e square on the hypotenuse of the right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the legs." T h e Pythagoreans thought everything was made of a number of little units, stationary atoms so to speak. T h e y thought that the sides of a square were composed of a certain number of units, and the diagonal of another number of them. T w o adjacent sides of the square and the diagonal will make a right-angled triangle. Now, the Pythagoreans had often played around with numbers, for numbers fascinated them. They knew that the square of an odd number is odd, and that the square of an even number is even. Since we square the 2 in squaring the even number, the square of an even number is always divisible by 4. Now returning to our right-angled triangle, the hypotenuse of which is the diagonal of the square, we can in modern symbols write as follows: Let y be the diagonal and x the side. T h e n y2 equals 2X2. Simplify by clearing fractions, and reduce to lowest terms by taking out the common factors on the two sides of the equation. Since y2 is equal to

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two of something, y2 is even. N o t e therefore that y must be even. T h e n y 2 is divisible by 4, and being also e q u a l to 2X2, x2 is divisible by 2. T h e r e f o r e x is even. B u t we h a d started by taking out all common factors of x and y. T h e r e fore, x being even, y must be odd. B u t we have just a moment ago proved y must be even. T h e r e f o r e if there is a n u m b e r y which here represents the length of the diagonal of the square, that y is both even and odd, an impossibility. W e conclude that there is no such n u m b e r as y. So no number, whole or fractional, can represent the diagonal of a square in the same units with which we measure the side. A l l this may be familiar, but I wanted to get the situation developed to a point where I could discuss what was involved. W e started to measure all lengths, and we came to some which c o u l d not be measured by fractions. If the side of the square is 1, then the diagonal is the square root of 2. Of course, we could just write "square-root-of-two ( V 2 ) " as a new n u m b e r and go on from there. B u t there is no fraction (or " r a t i o n a l " n u m b e r ) that is equal to the square root of 2, just as there is also no fraction that is equal to the ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle, and there must be many more of these, an uncountable infinity in fact. W e f o u n d ourselves facing the problem of " i r r a t i o n a l " n u m bers. In order to be able to add or divide such numbers a n d the lengths which they represent, we needed a new series of a numerical sort which could be used to measure all lengths. W e needed to construct sets of numbers having the property that w h e n they are put in series according to size, they w o u l d parallel all the possible lengths on a line. T h i s construction was made and is the famous "arithmetical cont i n u u m , " whose members are euphemistically called " r e a l "

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numbers. It includes equivalents for all of both the rational and the irrational numbers. T h e arithmetical c o n t i n u u m which we thus construct is a series whose members are infinite sets of pairs of numbers, or so-called segments. Each segment starts at zero, but does not include zero, and stops just short of any place you may want to locate. Each segment has no first term and no last. T h e segment in the arithmetical c o n t i n u u m corresponding to 1 over 2 is composed of all the pairs of numbers u p to, but not including, 1 over 2. In more ordinary speech, the segment for \/2 composed of all the fractions smaller than y 2 . T h e segment corresponding to the square root of 2 includes all fractions whose squares are smaller than 2. Such a segment exists in spite of the fact that there is n o fraction exactly equal to the square root of 2. T h e membership of a segment has no last pair of numbers in it, although there are pairs of numbers lying beyond it. T h e segments can be added and subtracted o w i n g to their relationship to addition or subtraction of pairs of numbers. W e need not explain further, but simply point out that there is a segment for every conceivable length on a line as you start from any given point. W h a t are we to say of this from the point of view of the philosopher? Zeno and Plato thought they had proved the world of the senses was irrational, self-contradictory. Did they not prove that their w o r l d of mathematics was inadequate, and had to be supplemented? A length on a line is itself an ideal construction, b e g i n n i n g with a point and ending with a point, and you cannot observe points. It is a natural construction, however, after you have observed less exact distances. T h e n you go on to equate this with a pair of numbers, and here the trouble starts; that is, it starts

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within the ideal realm of mathematics, for the ideal length and the pair of numbers are as different as space and discrete number. In the world of observable space you can move forward without trouble. It was in the world of pairs of numbers that Zeno tried to start in at the wrong end, the infinite end, of an infinite series. Also let us note that in the geometrical proof of the Pythagorean theorem in Euclidean geometry, you show one area is equal to the sum of two other areas. If you draw the squares, the proof follows without contradiction. But when you state the Pythagorean theorem as an equation between numbers, then you get, in the realm of numbers, something which cannot be represented by the meager supply of numbers you have. It is not space perception that is inadequate but your pairs of numbers, mathematics and not the senses. You may try to resolve Zeno by showing that the sum to infinity of a mathematical series may be finite. But with that the senses have nothing to do, for where do the senses show you anything infinite? Of course you may, like Einstein, wish to use the geometry of Riemann instead of Euclid. T h e n your geometrical Pythagorean proof also falls down, because without parallels you cannot even construct the squares needed. Now you realize that even in geometrical proof you are dealing with an intellectual subject matter, and not merely with the sense figures, and that Riemann is not irrational, but another genuine possibility. Alternative possibilities are not a matter for simple sense perception, but for thought. Russell once quoted, with glee, the statement of Hegel that "the discrete and the continuous are one and the same," and added that from that time on Hegel observed a discrete and continuous silence concerning what he meant by that

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statement. Are we better than Hegel? Have we in the arithmetical continuum built continuity out of discrete elements? We have produced something arithmetical, more or less like continuities, which can be made useful in measuring continuous extensions. But it is too good. For instance, we can destroy the arithmetical continuum by adding more elements. T h e segment representing 1/£ has all the fractions previous to Make a new segment which includes itself and put that in, and the resulting series is not even dense. I see no more reason for calling the arithmetical continuum a real continuum than I see for calling a pair of numbers a length. A thing and its measurement are usually different. T h e measurement is the relation of the thing to other things. One extended thing may have two or more measurements and still be the same thing, as in the relativity theory. If, however, you are not measuring the same objective extensity in the two measurements, the relativity theory falls apart. You get into paradoxes because you speak of "correlation" of measurements instead of different measurements of the same "correlation." T o take another example, there is a parallelism between a curve and an algebraic equation in Descartes' analytic geometry. But that is no reason for saying that an equation actually is a space curvc. A length on a line is not a pair of numbers, and a pair of numbers is not a length on a line. T h e triumphant construction of the arithmetical continuum out of discrete elements was an inspiration to various thinkers to go ahead and eliminate other supposed realities by replacing them with constructions. T h i s enthusiasm for constructions was even shared by those who said all relations not given to sense perception are tautologies and therefore vacuous. Anyhow, enthusiasm it was, and it reminds me of

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Mark T w a i n ' s tunnel builders, who were so delighted with their tunnel when they got it through the hill, that they just went right on building their tunnel straight out over the neighboring valley. Some of the constructions grew quite complicated, with infinite numbers of elements, but it was all done in the name of metaphysical economy, of getting rid of superfluous entities. T h e cartoonist, R u b e Goldberg, used to draw pictures of "inventions," showing how to light a candle or drive a tack by using a vast, complicated mechanism in which this pushed that, and that knocked over something else, until the desired action was finally completed. Some of the philosophical constructions produced in the name of this Goldbergian economy have been of more than Goldbergian complexity. Some of them almost turned the trick. A now famous example of Goldbergian construction, and one that I have mentioned earlier, was the replacement of the number 2, accomplished by Frege and Russell. T w o was replaced by the class of all the pairs of things. Every time somebody got married or became a widower, this number 2 changed. If the extreme monists were right, and there is only one thing in the world, then the number 2 is the empty class, and so is the number 3, and hence 2 equals 3. It was also long recognized, by Berkeley, by Frege himself, by William James, that twoness does not apply to things simply, but only under a concept. As a tree this thing is one, but as roots and branches it is many, and as leaves or cells it is almost uncountable. James remarked that the earth is one, as the earth; but it is also two as hemispheres, in a number of different ways; and as molecules it is a vast number of things. When we talk about the pairs of things, in extensional logic, just what are we talking about? Do we include

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pairs of stairs, pairs of trousers, possible pairs? W e might be able to get along without " t h e number two" altogether. B u t why identify its ideal existence with the actual contingent existence of sets of physical things, or thoughts, or dreams? T h e s e it certainly is not, for they change all the time. A similar Goldbergian construction was to propose the replacement of a mathematical point by sets or series of the objects, whether areas or volumes, which would be considered as overlapping or including the point. T h i s would eliminate that peculiar ontological being, the space point, or the instant of time. Let us start with a typical question which might be asked in the Newtonian differential calculus. " I f a train is rushing along at ninety miles an hour, is there any part of the train that is standing still?" T o somebody who answers that such a thing is absurd, it is pointed out triumphantly that the wheel is not sliding on the rail, so the part that is touching the rail is at rest. T h e challenger may still feel tricked, and say that a given particle touches the rail for only a mathematical instant, that it is nonsense to talk about motion at an instant, that motion must involve an interval of time, however small. H e is then told that the flange of the wheel below the contact with the rail is actually moving backwards and cannot change to forward motion instantly, so that in this case there is an interval of time. T h e Calculus in its present day development does not presuppose actual infinitesimals or involve any inexactitude, and it can study conditions at an instant. It does so by constructing a series of finite lengths which converge upon the point or instant, which becomes the limit of the series as the lengths grow smaller. T h e limit of a series is not, in general, a m e m b e r of that series, so we can replace the limit by the series for some purposes and not suppose the limit actual.

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When a velocity is changing, we can quite properly consider the average velocity over shorter and shorter intervals, and note that this velocity approaches closer and closer to a limit as the intervals grow smaller and smaller. So we can say that at the limiting instant the velocity is pinned down quite exactly to such and such a value, although, ontologically speaking, velocity at an instant might be thought selfcontradictory. In this case, of course, we already have the instant specified as one end of each of the intervals concerned, so we do not eliminate instants, but only velocity at an instant, which expression is given a new meaning. Professor Whitehead proposed to eliminate points by a similar series converging on the point and substituting the series for the limit point itself, which would not be a member of the series. T h e point would in no sense be thought of as existing. We might imagine a crystal ball, and inside it, well inside, another ball, and in that another. W e are not suggesting a series of perfect spheres, for a point would be presupposed in defining what we meant by a perfect sphere. No, we are supposing just ordinary, imperfect spheres, and even some indefiniteness of boundaries. But in such a series of imperfect spheres, no matter how many we have up to a selected place, the last member to that place still has an infinity of possible points within it, and the series may be continued in an infinity of ways. T h e r e is no rule to be drawn from what has gone before that completely determines where the series will go in the future, and so the series does not converge. We can make it converge to a specific point only by specifying that point, which defeats our purpose, that of getting rid of the point. Any one of the spheres is as good or bad a substitute for a point as is the whole set. Therefore this method of getting exactness out of inexact-

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ness seems to m e to fail. I would have been ready to cheer if the construction had succeeded, for it w o u l d have b r i d g e d the gap between the indefiniteness of the data perceived by sense a n d the exactness of mathematical physics. As yet points a n d lines of geometry seem to remain irreducible to sets of verifiable data of sense. Please understand I do not object to constructions, even G o l d b e r g i a n ones, if only they accomplish what they set out to do. Constructions I admire. For, in fact, the whole of mathematics is construction and synthetic, a n d is not analysis. It is the product of a process of building-up, always novelty, a n d not tautology. Y o u say, " B u t look, this is just tautology, repetition of the same: I + I = 2 ; I + 1 + I = 3- T h e first two of the i's e q u a l 2, so you can write 2 + 1 = 3. B u t I ask you, Does 1 + 1 e q u a l 2? N o t if the 1 is the same 1. A cat plus the same cat over again is not two cats, it is only one cat; 1 + 1 = 1. It is one plus one-prime (1 -f- 1') that equals 2. T h e " e q u a l s 2 " is not a synthesis. T h a t is just g i v i n g a name. B u t the 1 + 1 ' on the left of your equation means two numerically different i's, and the combination of them is a synthesis. T h e L o g i c a l Positivists hold that logical reasoning is analysis a n d that all syntheses are derived f r o m empirical perceptions. I shall try to show later on that e m p i r i c a l perceptions do o f t e n give us synthesis—usually some synthesis we do not want. T h e y may involve physically synthetic activities of focusing. B u t when we get the content of the perception, what we do is to take the perceived field apart. Perceiving is analyzing. T h e Positivists claim to k n o w int u i t i v e l y — I suppose a priori—that we cannot a r r i v e at new truths by deduction. On the contrary, e x a m i n a t i o n of a mathematical system will show synthesis coming in at every

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gateway. Conventions are syntheses, definitions are syntheses, postulates are syntheses, sets of postulates put together are syntheses, proofs are syntheses, even when the proofs are by substitution. For unless the substitution is purely verbal and belongs in a footnote about usage, what we substitute is only in part identical with what we substitute it for, even if it is only numerical difference without qualitative difference. Any complex is a synthesis. We can see this most clearly in a case like, T h e book is on the dish. We can take this combination apart and put it together again, using exactly the same components, and get, T h e dish is on the book. Note that the two cases are quite different syntheses, each more than the sum of its parts. A definition is at times just the giving of a name, but what you give the name to is almost always a synthesized complex. Kant was right in saying that 7 + 5 = 12 is a synthesis. T h a t it is provable does not make it less a synthesis, in the usual and most reasonable sense of the term "synthesis." T h e proof itself would be another synthesis. T h i s is part of a long tradition of mathematics and logical theory, as in the term "synthetic geometry." A book of geometry has a few postulates on the first page. Getting all the rest of the book out of that page, by simply saying the postulates over again in new restatements, is getting a lot of rabbits out of one little hat. Wittgenstein came along, and everyone began to chant "tautology" and "substitution of identicals." And in a little while everybody was convinced that all mathematics is analytic and even a tautology. I am in accord with what Friedrich Waismann pointed out in his book (1936, translated 1951), the Introduction to Mathematical Thinking. For instance, recursive thinking, or "mathematical induction," says that if something, being true of one term of a discrete series, is true of

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the next; then if true of a specific one, it is true of all that follow. Waismann says that this is not the shortened form of an infinite series of syllogisms. No, we see at once a law, and we do not need the syllogisms. But the law is a formula for synthesis. I think Henri Poincaré would have agreed, although he is quoted as sponsoring the infinite syllogisms. I remember Henri Poincaré in his classroom. "Greatest mathematician in the world," they said, and I believed it. I remember the stooped shoulders, the scraggly beard, the eyes like a fish that stared straight ahead and, I felt sure, scarcely saw us, and the harsh voice. He paced back and forth like a caged animal, the clatter of his boots drowning out the flow of higher mathematics in French—Newtonian potential function, it was. From a little card, visiting card size, in the palm of his hand, he filled the long blackboard. Then he waved to the little factotum in the corner, who hurried out and sponged the board clean. T h e n Poincaré, rather ostentatiously I thought, turned that card over—and again filled the board from end to end. Later I was to see his funeral procession in the spring, as it went to Montparnasse; everything was in green, the green-plumed horses, the green ribbons from the hearse to the members of the French Academy that walked beside it, who also wore their green bands slanting across their breasts, and green on their cocked hats. The sun shone through the leaves, but I felt as if a great light had gone out. "Greatest mathematician in the world!" And when he said that mathematical induction is synthesis, I believed him. But synthesis is found throughout all mathematics. In a system of Euclidean geometry you lay down some postulates, and then you make a triangle out of three lines. You make a triangle, it is a construction. You define it, but the

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definition is not verbal, concerning its English name. Pascal as a boy was too young, his father thought, to have a book on geometry. So Pascal had to discover the proofs for himself, and he gave them private names. But it was Euclid's First Book, and Pascal's father had to admit that the boy, having rediscovered the subject, was probably mentally mature enough to read a printed book with the names in it that everybody used. What did the names matter? And so one makes a set of postulates for Euclid, and another for some non-Euclidean geometry. Mathematics makes things. It is remarkable, when you have made just a little, what a cathedral of thought you can then build firmly yet synthetically on that little foundation; it seems to explode in hundreds of implications. Mathematics is one of the fine arts, even where at first it seems to be reiterating stammeringly, "A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose." Deduction itself is, first of all, imaginative creative synthesis. A mathematical system is a typical and key example of "emergent evolution."

3- PERCEPTIONS

I W A S R E C E N T L Y commenting on the fact that I had not seen a good comet since Halley's in the winter of 1910. Somone asked how big it looked, and I replied without thinking, " A b o u t two feet long." Whether I was looking at that time at an object five million miles long in the sky, or, as some suppose, a projection of it on the back of my brain about a quarter of an inch long, and if I was reporting what it was "experienced as," it seems quite clear that what it was experienced as was not what it was. I suppose we should all be at first willing to grant that what I saw before me had some extension. And yet, at the very beginning of modern philosophy, Descartes divided the world into two parts, the extended and the mental, saying, as Spinoza repeated even more emphatically after him, that an idea has no extension at all, it is not "a picture on a tablet." Without trying to exhaust all of what Spinoza meant, we can remark that Descartes does seem to be in the peculiar position of holding that he could have a very clear idea of space and extension where there is no space or extension present. Yet that is like a blind man getting a clear idea of the color blue. If we know the parts and how they are put together, we can know about a thing, although we have never met that thing itself—like for instance the pyramids

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of Egypt. But how can we have knowledge of something where we have never directly encountered any of its parts? How could Descartes have a clear and distinct idea of extension in space, if extension were totally nonmental? I early met one suggested solution of this in George Santayana's course on metaphysics back in 1 9 0 9 - 1 0 , which he was later to expand into a series of volumes. Aristotle had said that, in knowing something, we had before us the form without the matter, for the passive intellect could take all forms. In Santayana's terminology, we could get the essence without the existence. T h i s usage is highly Scholastic, for Santayana had studied the medieval Catholic philosophy intently, as is perhaps not usually known. Santayana had a strong etymological objection to the use, then current, of the term "subsistence" in place of the term "essence." Essences as thought of by Santayana seemed here to indicate a doubling of existence, whereby one perceives all that one ever could conceivably perceive of an existent thing without perceiving the thing itself. So also Whitehead speaks of "eternal objects" that "ingress" into the world of change. Universal, eternal blueness, let us say, here finds a momentary example. T h i s goes not badly when it is a quality or quale. But I remember that I wanted to know from Santayana if the essence of real existence really exists, the essence of change changes, the essence of spatial extension is extended in space? If the essence of fire does not burn, is it the essence of fire? Shall we encounter the essence of extension in the unextended, or the essence of change in that which does not change? We ask whether in perception we perceive the moon herself, and we are told no, we are seeing her twin sister, who looks exactly like her. T h i s is an eternal moon that ingresses into the mind, a moon due to some causal ac-

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tion of the real b u t always u n k n o w n moon; one that then needs to be projected into a private and symbolic space, the unextended space of our perceptions, the only space we ever experience. But just what is this paradoxical thing, an unextended space? I have been leading u p to a not too unintelligible question: W h a t can we observe? Descartes and Locke said we observe directly only our own ideas. Locke added that some ideas, but not all, resemble their causes. T h e r e is a tendency to return to this dualist theory today. As Professor Lovejoy has put it, the revolt against dualism has failed. Even Whitehead, starting out with a determination to do away with the bifurcation of nature, ends, in his little book, Symbolism, with the conclusion we have just stated, that all our ordinary, daylight consciousness, with its colors and sounds, its forests of trees and apparently distant stars, is only symbolic of the world of physical nature. H e and likewise Russell seem to differ from Leibniz in supposing, where Leibniz thought the m i n d was completely without windows, that the mind has some windows open, b u t that they are all down in the subbasement. It seems to me the mind cannot be wholly symbolic. It is not a completely lonely stream of consciousness. Somewhere we must cash in our symbols for their values. We know what a sign of something means only when we somewhere know both ends of the relation. T o me it is the great strength of Berkeley to have said: If we know the external world only through our ideas, and if the external world then disappeared, and left only our ideas, how could we ever know the difference? This, to me, is a conclusive argument against complete bifurcation. It is true that Berkeley, thinking that what we immediately perceive is purely mental, then has to

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bring in God to linger around of nights and make sure the world stays put, so that it will be waiting for us in the morning. As Prichard has well said, "If Berkeley's God is to provide us the world we know, God will have to act like the sun, moon and stars." Personally I think that when a philosopher has to bring in God to take care of little extra details and menial tasks, that philosopher has failed. T h i s is very clear in the case of Leibniz. Leibniz was a man of very great intelligence, but when he got into the smug self-satisfaction of his rhapsody on God, as that Being who, by "pre-established harmony," made totally disconnected creatures all act together through all eternity, he was making God a deus ex machina that solved every problem before it arose. T h e result seems to me to be a complete predestinationism and the absence of free will in any proper sense. His "monads" or minds are wound up to run in a fixed groove for all time to come. T h e monads are puppets, who are looking at a blurred copy of a movie film prepared long in advance. I have sometimes wondered what would happen if one of those monads of Leibniz' stopped following the "party line" and went off on a little private rebellion. I presume that the offending monad would be banished to a cosmic Siberia. But the other monads would never miss him, for his picture would already be there on their private films. He would be like Dante's friend, whom Dante found in the lower depths of hell. Dante was surprised, having seen his friend only recently on the streets of Florence. But the man explained he had been down in hell a long, long time, and what Dante had recently seen up above was a devil walking around in the dead man's skin. Professor Santayana used to express especial pleasure at this delicate compliment Dante here paid to his contemporary. Leibniz' monads also

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remind me of one of our eastern university presidents, who said that at his institution the professors of government and economics were allowed the most complete freedom to think and say whatever they wanted to. And then, as an afterthought, he added, "Of course we pick our professors very carefully to begin with." T h e monads were very carefully picked by Leibniz, and then they were told, " Y o u are free." T h e y were free to mirror the world, which world consisted of other monads, who were also mirrors. T h e whole set of monads are nothing but cloudy mirrors—mirroring other mirrors. If it were not for the clouds, there would be nothing to mirror. Such is the perfect carrying out of the hypothesis that a mind knows only its own ideas in its own "idea-space," and yet must keep in step with all the other minds. I do not think that perception, as such, is symbolic, a mirror image, a copy in our minds of something outside or unobservable. I think that analogies between perception and the things seen on the television screen are analogies looking in the wrong direction. So convinced am I that, in the realms of thought and the interpretation of language, our minds must be and are creative and organizational, that I feel the imperative need of making direct contact somewhere between the thoughts within us and the great world outside us. There is no place for such contact except in perception. Without perceptions that make contact with the world outside, we are Leibnizian monads without windows. I do not think that any appeal to God or the Absolute can help us. That is a dens ex machina general solution of problems which we have to solve specifically. We can not call up the Absolute on the telephone and ask, "What's the answer?" We have to test our hypotheses and verify our judg-

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ments by our own activities of perception. W e must make our dream coherent, but to be knowledge it must also cohere with specific objective facts. I like the sturdy empiricism of Bill Klem, former baseball umpire in the National League. Someone asked, " D o you always call them the way you see them?" and he snorted, " N o , I calls 'em the way they is." It is not enough to say with Schopenhauer and Whitehead, that if we penetrate down into the depths of our being, there we can feel the great creative pulse of the world outside. W e do not want to feel pulses. W e do usually want to know the systems of the world beyond us. Perception seems to me objective. T h e perceived world is pretty much the way it seems; that is, as the common world seems to minds that have not been debauched by too much Berkeley or Locke. T a k e the world of sight or touch. W e are told that what we perceive is, as Mr. Herbert Dingle calls it, "patterned quality." I would say we perceive "qualitied pattern," and I think the distinction is very important. Most quality is veneer. T h e pattern is the real structure. At this point we are told that we can not perceive anything that does not have quality. T o this synthetic pronouncement a priori, I think the reply is that we do. T h e peculiar quality or quale of the perceptions that give us the external world does not matter too much. T h e quality of touch, as I run my hand over something, I can distinguish quite easily, it seems to me, from the shape of the thing I am touching. W h e n I pick up a b o x I experience two shapes, hand and box, but only one set of touch qualities, which latter I locate in my hand and not the box. My partly colorblind friend and I get along very nicely, except I have vague apprehensions when he is at the wheel and we come to a stop-light. T h e hunter and his totally color-blind dog co-

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operate with little difficulty. I have found the blind man taking the world much as I do. If I wear blue glasses, and a friend puts on rose-colored glasses, emotionally I may feel a little more glum, but we can transact our business together. Douglas Clyde Macintosh once made a suggestion, which I took rather lightly at the time, but which now I tend to think more highly of. He said we are provided in perception, visual or tactual, with a mechanism which colors our world qualitatively for us, so that we can see it better, just as a biologist puts stains on his slides so that he can see the chromosomes better. I used to be worried when I studied the old WundtTitchener psychology and was told that there were "local signs" on the skin, which were unperceivable or below the threshold differences of quality, and by their aid I was able to discriminate just where I was touched on the skin. These were differences of quality and not of space, for space location could not be experienced as such. " H o w did Wundt and Titchener know there were such differences of quality, if nobody ever experienced these qualities?" I said to myself. "Perceived space is itself a quality, and why suppose it always needs another quality or quale to mark its place?" Wundt and Titchener said that space is just the series of qualities. But how can I note the series of qualities, if I never note the members of the series? T h e sensations in my joints tell me very accurately where my limbs are, but I have never discriminated any other quality there, comparable to touch or heat, nor has anybody else done so. It is just position, experienced directly. I walk along in the dark with a cane, and I feel very accurately where the end of that cane is. What about the amputated limb that is still felt? I believe

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that case to be a sort of memory-after-image, which, I understand, soon fades. In the case of vision, it may be asked, do we not have to have images of color up in the brain when a certain length of vibration reaches there? T h e evidence to me is all to the contrary about the vibrations that reach the brain. A nerve c ell acts wholly or not at all, and always at its own rate; it never carries some other vibration, least of all a light-ray vibration rate. It may be that, correlative with red and green, some nerve currents are carried to the brain on different pathways. Yes, but what goes up the pathways is exactly the same in both cases. I would say that nothing in the brain accounts for the correlation between color and certain physical vibrations, for those vibrations never reach the brain. I may be wrong about this. I report what the scientists say. Nerves all vibrate alike. T h e ancient Atomists pictured a tree as throwing off little trees, which, growing smaller as they shot outward, entered into man and gave us our knowledge of the tree that emitted them. Even this seems to me more adequate, because the little copies were at least in the round, than the theories of modern thinkers who suppose we get our knowledge of a tree from flat images on the retina. They talk as if there were a little man inside us, who stands on his head to look at the upside-down picture on the retina. T h e images on the retinas of the two eyes are not superimposable, and this might well give the little man a headache. Shall we then tell the little man to look at the projection on the brain? One brain anatomist, trying to trace the projection on the brain of a simple circle at the retina, found the projection would be two horseshoe-shaped figures, one in each hemisphere of

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the brain. T h e little man had better go outside and look at the circle, before it gets broken up. T h e brain does not seem to be a television screen.

T h e r e is little to show that we ever see flat images and then project them. T h e r e are a few cases, for instance the colored negative afterimages. It is as if we looked through a piece of colored glass close to the eye. W e may throw half of such an image small on the fingernail, and see the other half gigantic on the distant wall. B u t that projection is into a world already three-dimensional. W e tell a small boy to draw a picture of a house. H e is to do it on a flat sheet of paper. H e draws the front and the side rectangular, and then has trouble putting on the roof. W e say the poor dear child does not understand perspective. But the boy is drawing what he sees. H e sees houses in three dimensions. T h e boy never saw a house c o m i n g to a point in the back. It is not the boy's fault if he has trouble fitting a familiar threedimensional thing into a two-dimensional flat surface, like a sort of Mercator's projection. H u m e said we see images and not the physical thing, for if wc press one eyeball, we see two images of the gatepost, whereas there is only one gatepost. No, we see the same gatepost twice. T h e really astonishing thing is that with two eyes we do not see everything twice. I tell a y o u n g man it is not really extraordinary if he sees on occasion two moons, for he has two eyes. But if he ever gets to the point of seeing three moons, be sure to let someone else drive the car! I recall an angry little fellow in a cartoon, who had fallen into a dehydrating machine. H e had been reduced to midget size. But he had suffered a change not too different from what my friend is supposed to suffer, who simply walks away from me down the street until he disappears behind an ob-

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ject smaller than he is, but closer at hand. Yet it is only with an effort that I think of him as getting smaller. I see him still six feet tall, but going further away. He does not shrink to six inches, even when he is about to disappear in the distance. T h e medium in between may blur him a bit, but to me he is the same. T h e n someone explains, "What you really see is an image growing smaller, but you interpret it as distance." I deny I really see any such image. I simply see him himself, at a distance, full size. May I introduce the concept of "objective ambiguity"? I see a mark on the window pane, and I think I see an airplane far away. This is a typical perceptual error. It is an error of objective ambiguity, because what I see is really and objectively there, but I mistake it for something else, because of a partial identity of appearance. A moment later, a motion by me, or a lack of motion by it, and I know it is a mark on the window, and not a plane far off yonder in the sky. There is no reason why I cannot see a thing directly, and yet be mistaken about it. T h e notion that a monistic, non-copy theory of perception cannot account for perceptual error is quite wrong. Judgment often comes in to determine distance, because what I see I may see under such limitations, or in a form so fragmentary, that I have to judge about it. There are then the points mentioned in the psychology books. I judge that the thing is far away by the height in my field of vision and the ground intervening, by how much it moves as I move, by whether something intervening would cover it. But none of these prove I see an image in my head, and not something out there. I see an automobile of normal size down the street, and it looks normal size. I see the same automobile from a tall building, looking down upon it at an unusual angle, and I say, " H o w

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small that car looksI" I am seeing the same car, both times at a distance. Seeing things as small is the exception. People talk about seeing flat elliptical pennies. I do not ever recall seeing an elliptical penny except once, and that penny had been run over by a streetcar. What I have always seen has been a round penny in three dimensions, with one edge closer to me. Perception is of something at a place from a place. T h e r e is no reason to bring the thing perceived from the place where it is perceived to be. If it were here it might knock me down, but it would not be more seeable. But somebody may ask, " H o w about a star that's a hundred light-years away? 'Twinkle, twinkle, little star.' Y o u put on green glasses now, and turn it green a century ago. H o w absurd!" I beg you to note that if you do see it " u p above the world so high," it can not be so little as you say it is. I admit and I assert that anything you see at a distance, you see in the past. T h e place from which you see it is here and now. T h e place at which you see it may be both yonder and long ago. T h e time difference is there, but not noted; else it would not have taken until the seventeenth century to discover the finite velocity of light—objective ambiguity again. You say the past is unobservable, for it no longer exists. I say in reply that I do not say the past exists now, any more than I say the distant thing exists here. Granted the relativity theory, if the light comes freely, there may be a temporal interval, but there is no causal interval; causally the finite speed must be treated as if it were infinite. You read letters that were written a hundred years ago, because they have survived. But you do not perceive the star of a hundred years ago as now surviving; you see the star of a hundred years ago, as it was, and as seen from now, and over yonder, as seen from here.

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Let us now raise a different question of bifurcation. A musician hears a single note on the piano. A moment later he recognizes the presence of a number of overtones, though not all, for some are too faint to be discriminated by him without the aid of special resonators. Did he hear one note on the piano? You claim the unanalyzed note is not the same as the analyzed. H e will claim one note; that he analyzed the note he heard. I think he is reporting only one perception, though different stages of attention. T h e child sees a flower. Y o u point out to him stamens and pistil, and give him their names. H e continues to look and now he sees them, as he did not before. You say he is seeing the same flower but not the same mental image, so we have to distinguish the image from the flower. B u t why push in this new thing, an image, between him and the flower? A change of attention does not constitute a new object. But there is this to be said, that what we perceive is not the appearance of a thing in isolation, but the thing in a context. What we see is a total field containing the thing, and, in the case of vision, a medium through which we see it. What I perceive is the total field, and it can be analyzed wrongly as well as rightly, as regards what belongs to what. When I put on green glasses and see a green star, the green is in the glasses and not in the star. We can thus analyze what belongs to what, as we are regularly doing every waking moment. T h e field is a changing field in vision, and some of the changes are due to change of the place from which we see, some to the change of the place at which the object is. But there is no additional perceptual space which I must interpret symbolically. Bad eyes fog the field; they are part of the medium. Focusing the eyes, moving the head, are acts enabling us to see more clearly. We can see the sun

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above the horizon when it is really below, because we see it through a medium. It is nowise different when we see something in a mirror, and go wrong because we do not notice the mirror. Nobody believes there is a " m i r r o r space" except Alice in W o n d e r l a n d , and certain e m i n e n t philosophers such as M r . C. D. Broad. T h e r e is a total field in perceiving, within which we have to analyze out what is given and what belongs to what. A b l i n d man suddenly given sight might see correctly, yet be unable to discriminate. O b j e c t i v e ambiguity may cause us to supplement what we see by wrong associations from the past. T h e r e are special difficulties, however, about the visual perception of light and color, which indicate the colors in a field of view may not exist outside it. Contrast colors are a good case in point. W e see a black disk in a brilliant light, and it seems almost white. W e hold up a white card beside it, and instantly it turns inky black. Black is a contrast color. I n total darkness we see gray. W h i t e cards on the lawn, some in sunshine and some in shadow, look all of them the same shade of white. B u t if an artist tried to paint them the same shade, the result would not look right. T h e artist, translating into his two-dimensional medium, may show cows purple and foreshortened. I would rather be a purple cow than a foreshortened one. Contrast colors, and the blue of the distant hills, belong often to the field as a whole and not to the things in it. W h a t I am saying is that behaviorism gives the best account of the beginnings of perception, an organism reacting with an environment in the space of every day, which is also the space of physics. W e perceive that space. T h e content of which wc are conscious is spread out in that space. T h e first

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things we perceive are motions rather than qualities. We do not construct an additional perceptual space or spaces. We do not construct a perceived space in any degree. We might later construct an imagined space, "magic casements opening on the foam." T h a t which we perceive is from a place and at various places, constituting a field, a perspective. What belongs to what, that is something we have to analyze out. We do not perceive visually in two dimensions and then construct the third. We do not see elliptical pennies and lozenge-shaped table tops. We see round pennies in three dimensions. We see rectangular table tops in three dimensions, with one corner closer to us. A perspective blends smoothly into later perspectives. Kant thought of colors and other qualities as coming from somewhere else, but spatially ordered by the mind. I almost reverse this. I think of one space, objective, and not coming inside the head to be there reassembled. T h e quales belong to the fields of appearance. In some cases they might even belong to the awareness, as Professor Curt Ducasse has contended, adverbs not adjectives. We may supplement the field on occasion by memory-images, but hallucinations are rare. Even when we see a ghost in a doorway, the doorway is "out there." Kant talks of "consciousness as such" as organizing space, and providing the same world because each perceiver has the same type of mind. This is not enough. A dozen typewriter machines in a dozen offices may have the same mechanism, but they do not write the same correspondence. We need to account for a dozen minds with a dozen unities of apperception all perceiving the same space, and that result Kant's common model of mind does not assure us. If they do not perceive the same space, then we

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are back in Leibniz' pre-established harmony. T h i s is our choice, either perceiving the same external space, or the windowless monads of Leibniz. What about memory images, duplicates of past experience? If we do not like the theory of the subconscious, we can claim that our brains recreate them, and perhaps venture to add that our brains must have created our primary experiences. As for supposing our brains, all vibrations and motions, create the world we perceive, I cannot see how they do or can. Although the brain is very complex, it is only a spatial system of relays. I therefore lean towards a belief in some subconscious retention, and that the brain merely calls the images up or suppresses them. T h e imagery is spatial when it is the duplicate of tridimensional previous experiences, and I think that the vast majority of cases, if we could compare, would reveal it as very much transformed and distorted from the originals. How about memory as such? I do not think memory is memory images, for the latter often seem of recent date or of no recognizable date. Titchener said completeness of imagery made memory. But you can know by testimony, and even picture to yourself in imagery, much more about a scene than you may remember. Is it, then, the warmth and intimacy that tells you this is a memory of your own? I do not think these are real emotions, they are just names for the fact that you do know you were there. Some people are sure a priori that for the past all our knowledge must be a copy and not the original. Absurd as it may appear to them, I on the contrary have a conviction about many of the events in my own past, a conviction not founded on any supporting external evidence I can locate, that I do immediately and directly know I was there, although I may often be wrong

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about the precise details. That is, I would agree with Bergson about the distinction between real memory of dated specific events, and habit memory. But he seems to think the past is preserved into the present. What I myself seem to experience is the past remaining back in the past. It is too much of a question to discuss adequately here. I would say that memory is a sort of perception, and is not symbolic like language. In memory you see things in the past that were here once; in perception by sight you may see things in the past and at a distance. But perception is an awareness of space; and memory is primarily an awareness of time, of both a now and a then. There are other supposed cases of direct perception which I do not think I have had. Do we have a direct sense acquaintance with something as being not here? Do you, can you, perceive directly that there is not an elephant in your room? How can you see something which is not here? Where did you get your elephant? Once you put the question, "Is there an elephant here?", your elephant is provided by the question, and a proposed synthesis is provided as well. "There is not an elephant here" is the answer to a synthetic question, "Is there an elephant here?" It is impossible without the question. T h e immediate experience provides no elephant. But the question starts an inference from evidence, and it becomes a matter of testing a hypothesis. It throws light on what happens when you test other hypotheses. A hypothesis about atoms is not tested by observing the atoms. A hypothesis about something not here is not tested by observing "something not here." It goes like this. You think the elephant is here but perhaps transparent? No, whatever may be the case with Harvey the rabbit, elephants are always opaque. T h e elephant is under your chair? No,

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elephants are big. But these, please note, are all arguments from universal major premises, and the question was, " D o you see directly that there is not an elephant here?" You look around and say, "What I do see is incompatible with there being an elephant here." But again I ask how can you see an incompatibility? Of course my original statement was in effect a universal proposition about elephants, to the effect that " N o elephant is here," and you cannot establish any such universal by a simple enumeration. What are you enumerating? Elephants? Enumerating other things will not help, without a premise about incompatibility. You may reply by limiting the case to some individual elephant, say Jumbo. But it becomes even more evident that you would never have thought about Jumbo merely from an inspection of the room. T h e relation to Jumbo would be a new synthesis. Questions are syntheses, hypotheses. And a negative answer is not given by direct simple observation. People talk about simple reports of sense, and give us examples such as " T h i s rose is red," or " T h i s rose is not red." These have been called protocol statements. These, they tell us, are the only propositions in the world, or about the world, that are synthetic and have any meaning. I deny that as they stand—as supposedly simple—protocol statements of this type have themselves any meaning. I am not troubled about the word "this," as Hegelians are. I am troubled about the rest of each sentence. Let us consider, to begin with, the second one, " T h i s rose is not red." It is supposed to name a specific individual negative fact, in which roseness and redness are related here by a relation of not being related. We have maintained there are no such individual, objective, negative facts. Such protocol propositions are not reports of fact, but answers to synthetic

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questions, containing not names but "Russell descriptions," which are creations of language. T h e y are not to be stated in the form, "Yes, there are negative facts of this sort, and I have seen some," but as a universal negative proposition, " N o , there is no positive fact of this described sort." If the world were made up solely of this positive particular fact, and that one, and that other one, and nothing else, then my reply would itself be meaningless. B u t this leads to the conclusion that a simple enumerative universe, of the Wittgenstein-Russell sort, is not what we have. T h e r e really are universal negative facts, as well as particular positive ones. All universal facts are negative existentially, expressible by statements beginning with " N o . " Statements beginning with " A l l " are illegitimate, except as implying a " N o " in their meaning. Let us now look into the supposed positive protocol statements a little closer. " T h i s rose is red." Does this have a simple denotation, so that the sentence is the name of something? I recall saying earlier that when we have simple behavior, as the little girl responding to the cat by saying, "Pussy," that was not language yet, except in the sense that the thermostat is using language when it responds to the blast of cold air by saying " C l i c k . " I admit the little girl is a conscious being, and can develop language out of this later on. Professor J a m e s suggested that we have language when there is a response to a universal. B u t the thermostat responds to a universal, in a sense, for it responds to the coldness of the air, and not to other characters. James's imaginary polyp who responded to something going by, by saying to itself, " A h , ha, thingumbob again!" was using more elegant language than most polyps of my acquaintance, but is not this pretty much what the polyp does, except

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for that "again," which seems a little too much? A dog chewing a bone is not using language, nor is a dog responding to a bell by a conditioned reflex using language. T h e r e may be universals present here, as in the case of the thermostat, but the dog is responding to the case before him. It is the specific, partly acquired response of an individual organism to a single object at a single time. In the sentence, " T h i s rose is red," the "this" is the remains of some proper name like "Pussy." It might be used about another object at another time, b u t it has in itself n o such connotation of universality. T h e individual rose is individual as being existent, and all existents are individual. T h e rose is not a set of universals, the Platonic tradition to the contrary notwithstanding. For the causes of its characters it may depend on other things, b u t it and its characters are individual: the red part is just as individual as the rose part. Redness, as such, is neither individual nor universal, which remark I think Duns Scotus would have confirmed. As existent, the red of the rose is an individual spot of red; as a color it is universal; in itself the red is neither. But while the rose is indeed red, it is so only for normal vision under a certain sort of light. Under a green light it is black; under no light at all it is without color; for a partly colorblind man it is perhaps yellow. All one can truly say, as a datum useful for science, is that: " T h e r e are circumstances .v, normal circumstances, not here fully specified, u n d e r which the rose is red." T h i s is true, but not very valuable, without specifying still further. Vague truths are true enough, b u t science values truths as they become not merely true, but sufficiently specific to verify theories. When protocol propositions become accurate enough to be data for science, they cease to be simple. Not all complexity,

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however, is accuracy. As Bertrand Russell remarked humorously, "The whale is big," is an example of language at its best, saying much in little. But this is hardly a scientific statement. You may wish to ask whether, apart from scientific application, you could not report as an absolute intuition at this moment, "This is red"? Yes, you can, for "This is red," or "This is a headache," may be true, even absolutely true, because it is vague enough to hit the truth. There are no incorrigible intuitions which are not thus vague. But could we not do away with the vagueness by specifying, " T h i s is Red Number 27"? If you mean such is to be the proper name of this case, all right. But if you mean the color could be with certainty recognized again, or found in another example, no. He who has matched pastel shades on a color wheel knows how impossible it is to be sure whether two examples before him are qualitatively the same. But could he not check by the stimulus, the exact number of vibrations per second? This would be inference, and even here one is not sure about the conscious experience. For example, A might be indistinguishable from B, and B from C, yet A distinguishable from C. A curious but simple case of stimulus-response is holding up to the two ears in quick succession two tuning forks that do not "beat." T h e sounds will differ in pitch by a clearly noticeable amount, though the stimulus, the rate of vibration, is the same in both forks. T o sum up the general situation, there are no exact and incorrigible intuitions, either sensory or intellectual. Nothing is so clear and distinct that it cannot be doubted. The data obtained by analysis of immediate experience may have, however, characters not perceived in the experience itself. This is true even if you think of it as surface

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without depth. I can see A and B quite clearly, without noticing that one of them is the larger. I may see A is to the right of B, and B to the right of C, and also that A is to the right of C, without noting that, granted the first two facts, A must be to the right of C. Having this pointed out, I might conclude that C cannot be to the right of A. Not so: they might be around a circular table. T o be aware of this sort of thing, one needs to add to the observation of fact some consideration of the possibilities involved. It is perception plus, or intellectual perception. There are plenty of other facts, also, which we cannot establish by sensory observation, though they concern things observed. There are, for example, universal and negative facts, facts about possibilities and necessities, comparisons, relevance, certainly most causality, and, we may add, other people's existence. In the narrow meaning so often given to "verifiable," most of the world is not verifiable. You cannot even make a statement about a limited number of things in a purely positive way, for the limit needs a negative to define it. There are Logical Positivists who would dismiss all metaphysical criticism as meaningless verbiage. Sooner or later they pretty regularly commit themselves to some thesis of their own, which is not a statement about language or verifiable by the senses. This thesis usually has alternatives they have not considered. Metaphysics is the exploration of fundamental alternatives. All language considers alternao o

tives, so in this sense metaphysics is a higher semantics. Language is the statement, in concepts, of possibilities; it describes but does not name, else it would become meaningless when false. A "propositional function" is a concept, describing a combination of universals. T o paraphrase Aristotle, the existent is individual, but language primarily

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refers to universals. Through language we have the best evidence of the existence and character of other minds, not through analogy so much as through their contribution of thoughts different from ours. But language, because it presents only alternatives, must test its truth-claims by confronting them with existences, empirical facts, and therefore with perceptions. No truth is wholly self-evident. I hold certain metaphysical theses of my own. I hold, for instance, that quales and relations are very different, though Symbolic Logic finds only a difference in the number of variables in a propositional function. I hold that space and time are very different, although the Einstein theory has discovered interesting interrelations between the measurements of space, time and velocity. I hold that there is an aspect of both space and time which is not relational, but something substantive and qualitative. I hold that there are many minds, all linked together by their common world of space, which space is known directly, though of course not completely. I hold that sense quality or quale is a rather late product of emergent evolution, but no more essentially mental than physical. It is something consciousness is built on, rather than a product of mind. I hold that mind is itself a creative cause in the world. I hold that conscious awareness is a mental thing, that each mind has its own synthetic unity of apperception, its own experience, and that "experience in general" is meaningless. Minds have other aspects, such as the volitional and emotive, and are organizations. All these are working hypotheses, rather than final conclusions. T h e stream of my own consciousness contains much that is private to me, even running at times on two or three levels, one level perhaps commenting on another, "Look at what that fool is up to now." T h e r e may be sub-

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conscious levels. T h e world as perceived is not a collection of flat pictures, but is in the round, and fades gradually into an unobserved distance, and it has characters not attended to. It has depth; it is the same one world for science and common experience, in one space-time. Scientific data and aesthetic objects are late products out of this matrix, for the primitive life, lived by cows and pragmatists, is utilitarian, and not too rich qualitatively. Contrast with primitive consciousness the hearing of a symphony on the phonograph. A single wavy line is all there is on the record. But we do not hear a single wavy tone. We hear a dozen different instruments, and many of each, each with its tone color and intensity and place, and an organization of the piece as a whole. It moves our emotions and rouses our critical faculties as we evaluate composer and conductor. It expresses ourselves, as Croce says, but it expresses ourselves not because it is, as he would hold, the first thing in the way of consciousness, but because it is the late product of a long creative evolution. We have come quite a way since James's imaginary bright little polyp might have conceivably said, " A h , ha, thingumbob again!"

4. POSSIBILITIES

WHEN IMAGINATION ceases to be mere daydreaming it becomes thought, and adds to the realm of the really existent all the realms of the possible. It w o u l d be a perversion of rather obvious fact to suppose thought arises only when there are problems to be solved, and relapses into intuitive immediacy when the solutions are found. T h e world of thought is the very atmosphere in which the conscious life of civilized man is set. It is also and always a world of imagination. Burdened with sacks of groceries I turn the corner of the street, and find myself looking into the muzzle of a gun. A firm voice rings out, "Stick 'em up, Big Boy, stick 'em u p ! " T h e r e is hint of a water-pistol, and I realize I have to talk fast. I should certainly be terrified, except for the fact that the gun-toter is near three-feet-six, and his voice a childish treble. I have seen the facsimile of that gun, the holster, the cartridge belt, on the counter of a place which we elders, in our somewhat archaic language, refer to as " W o o l w o r t h ' s Five-and-Ten." A student once described Dante as "standing with one foot in the Middle Ages, with the other saluting the rising sun of the Renaissance." H o w e v e r unbecoming this football kicker's attitude for the sober-faced Dante, I cannot h e l p admiring our y o u n g friend here. H e

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also stands, o n e f o o t o n the firm c e m e n t of a city s i d e w a l k , the o t h e r on t h e g o l d e n desert sands of his i m a g i n a t i o n . If s o m e t h i n g really serious eventuates, he c a n r e t u r n to t h e l i g h t of c o m m o n day, w i t h d r a w that f o o t too f a r a d v a n c e d , a n d disappear a r o u n d the c o r n e r of the h o u s e w i t h a shrieki n g appeal, " M o m , M o m ! " P e r h a p s this also is just a n o t h e r illusion! B u t it is great to have such illusions. Y o u s h o u l d h a v e m o r e things in y o u r dreams, H o r a t i o , than there are in h e a v e n and earth. T h i s is play, b u t there is m o r e in child r e n ' s play than kittens that roll o n the

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c h i l d r e n at play are m o r e than r e c o g n i z i n g facts. T h e y are o f t e n reacting to s o m e t h i n g they k n o w is not there a n d n o t e x p e c t e d soon. It is a reaction to w o r l d s u n r e a l i z e d , a n d if they are u n r e a l i z a b l e , what of it? F r o m such a m a t r i x m a y c o m e mythologies, a n d also literatures a n d scientific theories. M i n d is superposed u p o n physical o r g a n i s m s transacting business w i t h their e n v i r o n m e n t . T h e b r a i n m a y have traces of the past in its pathways, b u t the b r a i n is a present t h i n g r e a c t i n g to present circumstances. M i n d looks b e f o r e a n d after. M i n d lives in an e n v i r o n m e n t of possibilities, seeing m o r e than physical eye can see. W h e n the eight-year-old K a n t went f r o m his h o m e in K ö n i g s b e r g o n the south b a n k of the Pregel R i v e r , crossing t w o of the seven bridges to reach the street l e a d i n g east on the north b a n k , he was walki n g to that eastern s u b u r b of the city w h e r e w e r e situated his school, three churches, a n d eighty-seven breweries. I suppose he saw all there was to be seen w i t h the eye a b o u t the seven bridges, t w o f r o m each b a n k to the l o w e r island, one f r o m each b a n k to the u p p e r island, a n d a b r i d g e b e t w e e n the islands. B u t w h e n the m a t h e m a t i c i a n E u l e r saw the bridges, he saw s o m e t h i n g m o r e . H e saw the fact that with-

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out going up into Poland to go around the river, one could not walk across all seven bridges without walking over one of them twice. On a new level of perception, a level of thoughtful perception, Euler saw not only the bridges but the possibilities. I have previously maintained that the eye cannot see the elephant that is not there. But we do establish negative judgments by perception. We accomplish this perhaps by observing something there that is incompatible with the elephant's presence. But the eye does not see this incompatibility. The incompatibility is, also, not in the words, or even in the meanings of the words, but in the existence of the things meant. We are able to speak meaningfully of a coexistence which is impossible. Thought can contemplate impossibilities, and perhaps there is where we get our great laws and generalizations of science. Among the limits of what is possible in fact, Sir Edmund Whittaker has given, in his book From Euclid to Eddington (1949), a striking list of "postulates of impotence." They are not to be established either by direct observation or by any self-contradiction in denying them, yet they organize our experience in such a way that they give evidence of being true. They could be stated in positive form, but they will remain universal propositions, and hence existentially negative. Whole branches of physical science may be founded on them. Examples of such postulates are the following: 1. It is impossible to detect a uniform motion of translation of a physical system by observations within the system. 2. It is impossible to derive mechanical effects from a portion of matter by cooling it below its surroundings. 3. It is impossible to devise a perpetual motion machine.

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4. It is impossible to set up an electric field in a space enclosed by a hollow conductor by charging the outside of the conductor. Whittaker comments that all electro-magnetic theory can be founded on this last impossibility plus the first, the relativity law. He mentions other such impossibilities (Milne, Bondi and Gold), that it is impossible to tell where one is in the universe, or to tell the cosmic time. These are universal truths, synthetic a priori, not known to be true by intuition, and yet not meaningless. Empirical truth is a relation between the intent of a proposition and the nature of the fact known, and needs both. A truth about the past or the future is not, except by courtesy, true now, for it needs the past or future end of the relation to make the relationship complete. But universal truths have no such correlated positive fact. T h e postulates of impotence, for example, put limits on the verifiable world. T h e y belong to thought and not to sense, but they may be true of the world revealed by the senses. Thought tries to solve problems and evaluate the good and the bad. It does so by introducing possibilities as well as actualities. It renders itself liable to error by claiming certain possibilities are actual when they are not. Thought compares. Even in our simplest apprehensions, one object may be bigger than another, but they do not compare themselves. Thought judges our perceptual fields, differentiating between what belongs to this and to that. T h o u g h t makes abstractions and generalizations. T h o u g h t notes absences, negatives, incompatibilities, impossibilities. It not only solves problems, it makes constructions. It not merely records enjoyments and compares them in later evaluations; it also evaluates larger things which never were simple enjoy-

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ments. It evaluates governments and nations, cultures and civilizations, arts and literatures. B u t to evaluate these, which it has no sense organ to perceive, it must construct a conceptual picture of them for itself. Theories and hypotheses move in a realm of possibilities. Mind exists where possibility separates out and becomes a force. Language expresses possibility, but is itself expressed in words. Words, as mere bodily reactions, may express little or nothing. A child near me in a crowded bus recently picked out a disreputable-looking old codger up front, and began yelling "Daddy," to the utter dismay of the young mother and the delight of other passengers. Aristotle said the child calls all men " f a t h e r " because thought is of the universal. There was no more thought of a universal here than when a thermostat goes off in the presence of a chunk of dry ice. A proper name, so far as there are such, is just the abbreviation of the reaction of an organism to an object in its environment. Naming is not yet language. B u t I think there are proper names. I recall being in the Greek Theater on the grounds of the University of California at Berkeley. A group sat down behind me. One man was admitting that they "did not have anything quite like this in Harrisburg, P-A." T h e local resident proudly showing him around said, " T h i s is our Greek T h e a t e r . " "Indeed! are there many Greeks in town?" His host explained there were a number, bootblacks, and restaurant waiters, but he added, " T h i s does not belong to them. 'Greek Theater' is just the name of it." "Oh, I see," said the man from Harrisburg. Some able philosophers have not been able to see as much. T r u e language comes when the user can use it to " n a m e " genuine universals, as in the common noun or other form of speech. Strictly speaking the indication of the universal

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is not man or red, but is human, is red, a "propositional function" being used and not a "name." T h e speaker can then designate the absent, the remote, the possible, the imaginary. Mr. Bertrand Russell thinks of phrases like "the king of France" as descriptions, but all language is description, and may have a meaning when nothing factual corresponds. It sets us free from bondage to the actual. But what is "the possible"? There are a number of meanings whicli we must discriminate. At times we say, " T h a t is possible. I do not really know." There are philosophers who have thought the possible was always just our ignorance, or at most a confused abstraction from the actual, thus making "the long second-best of this our actual world" their ideal. It is remarkable how great philosophers, philosophers such as Spinoza and Hegel, have thus reduced the ideal to the actual or beneath it. Though some of them may call themselves "idealists," they bow down before things as they are. Professor George Santayana thought, on the contrary, that it was the sign of a liberal mind to consider that what happens to be existent is merely a small selection out of the possibles, the wide realm of "essences." It was only with such a background, in such an atmosphere, that the life of the spirit could come to birth. "Everything ideal has a natural basis, but everything natural has an ideal fulfillment," said Santayana. I would prefer to say, more than one possible ideal fulfillment. So essences are all the characters and qualities, thought of or unthought of, that could be found in all the possible worlds. A centaur may not be biologically possible, as having two sets of internal organs, but the centaur is a possible essence. Perfect circles are essences, as ordinary circles have theirs. In the realm of essence are

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Santa Claus and Ulysses, Perfect Beauty and the E c o n o m i c Man, all the demons of the pit and the creatures of nightmares and the inhabitants of fairyland. B u t all existent things have their essences also. It is easy to start an argument whether a "square circle" is an essence or an unstable amalgam of two. Everything and its opposite is in the realm of essence; there are no universal truths there, for every generalization has its exception which is there too. P u r e "essential possibility" or " m e r e possibility" is too chaotic to be a useful conception. Santayana himself held that it was the possibilities that had connections and implications which were valuable for us to consider, the "systematic possibilities." T h e case which immediately comes to m i n d in considering systematic possibilities is that of mathematics. A typical case is that of a space of four space-dimensions. W e know what it would be like to live in such a space, where boxes might be four feet square one way and three feet square the other. W e could put a right glove right side out on the left hand; turn an unbroken hollow r u b b e r ball inside out; untie a knot while the ends were held; but we should have to spin a top around a plane. Non-Euclidean geometry was a similar discussion of possibilities, one of which now seems to be actual in our space. You say these systems are from arbitrary postulates. Even so, what follows, granted the postulates, is not arbitrary. It now seems the favorite illustrations of the older philosophers are not true of our space: parallel lines, angles of a triangle equal to two right angles, the Pythagorean theorem. W e were told it was impossible ever to determine that Euclid was empirically provable not to fit our world, but Einstein did it, and Euclid lost. Systematic possibilities are already found in scientific

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theories as yet untested and inventions as yet only in the blueprint stage. But even more striking is the content of the literary arts. By use of language, literature can trace out innumerable possibilities of connection not actual in our world, and these connections are not deductive and necessary as in mathematics. Literature may convey a great richness of experience, as in the novel, which portrays lives which were never lived, but might have been. Even the wildest romance of adventure must have some sort of inner coherence, though it need not be a copy of any existent system. All the literatures of the world give evidence that the consideration of coherent systematic possibilities is itself possible and valuable. T h r o u g h literature, said Lanson, the widest thoughts come down in definite form, to be grasped by those incapable of highly abstract reasoning. "It is Literature that maintains, in souls otherwise repressed by the needs of daily living, and submerged by material preoccupations, the inquietude of those mighty issues which dominate life and give it sense or goal." Literature lives among possibilities. Distinct from the possibilities vaguely left open by ignorance, and the possible sorts of mere essence or "whatness," and all the possible systematic structures ranging from mathematics to poetry, is still another use of the term "possible." We may ask of some suggested tiling or system, "Could it exist in this world?" " H o w possible is it?" Our statements are now limited by actual fact, and we answer the questions by saying such is quite possible or barely possible, possible under favorable conditions, probable or improbable, even impossible. We construct a "reasonable" hypothesis, a testable scientific theory. We hope to make between it and observable fact contacts which Northrop and Margenau

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have called "epistemic correlations." T o be found false, such a theory must first be constructed as a possibility. T o be true or usefully false, it must in most cases be close to the structure of the world of realities. These are existential possibilities. Unlike systematic possibilities they admit of degrees. What makes our difficulty in thinking about them is that we lack the power and fertility of imagination and discovery to hit on the novel but useful inventions and the actual but hidden capabilities in things. All existent things have in them such capabilities and surprises. T h i s is one of the chief evidences that we are in contact with real things, that they have that sort of hidden resources which we call dispositions and potentialities. Potentiality is a most important case of existential possibility. T h e real thing is continually giving us more than we had the wit to ask for. We do not verify the existence of other people by getting just what we expect from them, or by their acting just as we act. It is when they give us ideas that surprise us that we interpret this as coming from another mind, and coherence combined with surprise is our test. It is characteristic of existent and continuant things, a stone, a tree, a society, that they have unrevealed potentialities at any one time; and it is characteristic of the way we here understand potentiality, that the same thing may have not merely potentialities never realized, but many mutually exclusive potentialities. T h e seeds of the wheat plant may produce other wheat plants, or rot in the ground, or turn into flour in Minneapolis. B u t it is only when minds come upon the scene that potentialities have their full chance to become actual, and some to be chosen above others. T h e word " m i n d " refers, I think, to a definite sort of organized behavior which in its intent goes far beyond a phys-

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ical organism. T h e r e is awareness or consciousness, and the content or stream of consciousness. T h e r e are mental images, feelings and emotions, memories, percepts, concepts, interpretations, reasoning, constructive imagination. Beyond these there lies the whole universe of culture and civilized life into which we are born, yet which each of us must construct anew. We do not simply have civilization handed to us. From vibrations in the air and black marks on paper we make it, each for himself. For there is also privacy, an essential aspect of mind, and a very good thing it is. On a lower level it is a good thing that we are not goldfish bowls or cellophane bags, to expose all our current inanities and incoherences to public gaze. We do not want our thoughts dumped out on a counter for all to see, by some James Joyce-like customs inspector. But on a higher level also, the ability to have thoughts of one's own, to sit back from the action of the world and think things over, and enjoy our individuality, is one of the most precious traits of personality. We hope no " 1 9 8 4 " will bring an end to privacy and the human potentialities which are enriched by it. In a more philosophical sense potentialities should set us free from a crude phenomenalism. No real thing is naked with no hidden depths. It is always more than "what it is experienced as" at the moment. May I here comment on Hume, the phenomenalist. Hume, at the height of his great argument to establish skepticism about causality and relatedness, gives us, unexpectedly as coming from a nonrationalistic pure empiricist, a "thought experiment." He says that nothing is really and essentially connected with anything else, for we can think of any one thing as away, and the others still there. Surely a good empiricist ought to

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give us rather an operational proof. He should show us that we can actually and operationally take any given thing away and leave the rest. But can we? He says we never see a causal relation by direct observation. I fold a piece of paper. Do I not find that ever after it tends to fold on the same line? T h e paper has acquired a habit, a new potentiality—or does Hume hold, as he seems to elsewhere, that habits are not cases of causality? I find myself wondering what experience would have satisfied Hume's desire, when he looked within himself to find a thinker, or outwardly to find a cause. W e cannot simply open our eyes and see potentialities. But we do see an egg grow step by step, and we see nothing in the previous steps to indicate the exact turn taken next, but we see it happen again and again. Is this pure chance? T h a t would be a miracle indeed. Nor is it, perhaps, completely determined in advance. T h e world is causal. It is not an agglomeration of essences unthinkable apart, but a commonwealth of things, with various systematic connections, yet each with its own actuality. Causal relations are additional to, and more than, relations of essence. At this point, having completed my main exposition except for certain topics of time and value in the next chapter, I think it might be helpful if I traced the origin of some of these views. My first teacher in philosophy was Edwin Diller Starbuck. Starbuck, who later went from Earlham College to Iowa and Southern California, was tall and spare, with sharp-cut features, and a shock of coal-black hair which later was to turn snow white. I admired his skill in sitting on a chair at precarious angles, and his bubbling enthusiasm for philosophy. His statistics of religious experiences had inspired William James to start one of his greatest books.

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Starbuck's reading in philosophy was rather odd, such as the St. Louis School of Idealist philosophy, Sir William Hamilton, most muddled of logicians, and Mansel, who influenced Royce's Absolutism and made Herbert Spencer an unwitting Kantian. T h e r e early shaped up in my mind, as against subjectivisms and relativisms, a pluralist relational view of the world. For me it was part of the very definition of an existent thing, that although it had causes, once it was in existence it stood on its own feet in sturdy independence, like a son in relation to his father. Interaction presupposed existence, and so to me a relational view was almost the antithesis of a relativistic one. I early recognized that such terms as relation, coherence, substance, matter and form, value, experience, empiricism, operational definition, the scientific method, were omnibus words, covering a variety of particular cases, presenting not syntheses and solutions, but problems to be subdivided and attacked. At Harvard when I was a graduate student we were proud of our great Department. I noted twenty-five years later, reviewing some autobiographic sketches of the next generation of philosophers, that as each gave his sources the whole of American philosophy seemed then but the lengthening shadow of that one great Department. But at the time few seemed to be special disciples of any one philosopher. There was at Harvard little study of the history of philosophy for its own sake, such as at the Sage School at Cornell. I recall Professor Creighton wrote me, "Cornell stands for no 'isms,' but only for the great traditions of philosophy." I promptly labeled this pronouncement "Hegelianism." Dr. Ralph Barton Perry taught us to brush away verbalism and emotion, and consider honestly what exactly were the arguments of the different philosophers, and especially what was

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the value of each today. Even James, in his Pragmatism, was guided by a desire to get away from verbalism. Farthest from our thoughts was any such perversion as today's Pragmatism and Logical Positivism, making philosophy itself a mere linguistic exercise. T h e fourth of the great group, with James, Royce and Santayana, was George Herbert Palmer, himself a sort of figure out of history. A little man with a big white mustache, he could be seen hurrying from his house on the Harvard Yard to the chapel every morning, wearing a conspicuous pair of gloves; or later disrupting traffic in Harvard Square by darting across on a diagonal. His undergraduate ethics course, Philosophy 4 (not the course made famous by Owen Wister, he told me), was itself a Harvard tradition, voted yearly the finest course in Harvard College. I doubt if it was. Written out in heads and subheads, it was read verbatim, every year the same. We graduate students sat each week in the big window seat at Palmer's home, and read papers we composed on ethics. He sat at his desk, his profile turned our way, and interrupted every other sentence to ask just what we meant by it. He ranged widely. His casual comments, for instance on sculpture or poetry, might contain more real feeling for art than many an aesthetics lecture. He told us he never really slept, and often sat up all night dozing lightly. T h i s struck us as a bit uncanny, like the psychologist Miinsterberg's remark that he himself knew of dreams only by hearsay. In the field of ethics Palmer seemed to sum up all its past and none of its future. "Providence," he said, "has given me all the gifts I could have wanted except a spark of genius, and that perhaps is also for the best." But, "the little less, and what worlds away." A sophomore of average attainments told me he had taken

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courses with Royce and Palmer. I said he was fortunate to have such a teacher as Palmer. He replied, "Yes, Palmer is a good teacher. But Royce is a great man." My views about possibility were shaped by Royce, James, and Santayana. Of Royce and his Voluntarism I have spoken, and of his conviction that even the Absolute Mind needed possibilities to give him room to move around. Of William James what impressed me most was his appeal to unused potentialities hidden in all men. He delighted in the variety of individuals, and "potentiality" as thus used ceased to be merely an abstraction out of Aristotle. I think now of James as dressed in gray, with gray beard and kindly eyes, a figure rather stooped but trim, square black hat, starched cuffs, cane and gloves. I had expected an easy flow of language like the style of his essays, and I was surprised by the hesitations and the muffled voice. I have been told that the fluent easy run of his popular writing cost more erasing and revising than the famous involutions and parentheses in the novels cost his brother Henry. G. Stanley Hall, a rival of James in psychology, characterized not merely the Briefer Course but even the great Principles of Psychology as products of scissors and paste. But even Hall had to admit there was genius in the man, genius of what Ostwald has called "the romantic type," full of sudden insights and unexpected inventions. We apply the name "genius" to such men, and not to the more stolid encyclopedic virtues of a Royce. James, unlike Royce, was a man of the world, at home in any land or society. In another sense he was at home nowhere. He was a lifelong mental misfit, hurrying from New Hampshire to German health resorts and back again, as if trying to escape from himself. T o me, as to James, there was something in Santayana

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that was repellent—though James's hasty word "rotten" is too strong. It was a personal trait, a philosophical Mephistopheles with a lack of human sympathy, not due to his "philosophy of mud and rainbows." But there was a soundness in the man also, as I saw it, cool, clear-sighted, but aloof. Santayana met a high-school classmate of mine from Indiana out in the Arizona desert. My friend had just equipped himself with full cowboy regalia, and his slow speech and rugged features made Santayana feel here was a true son of the great West. T h e y liked one another at sight. Santayana was not altogether deceived—my friend loved horses, and became a successful rancher. Santayana was interested in types but not in the value of individuals. "Have you ever noticed in a street-car how ugly people are," he said one day, "if I were running things, I think I would throw out the present bunch and try again." Royce was impressive as he sat behind his classroom desk, with his big head and "indecent exposure of forehead." Santayana found Royce's voice harsh, but to me there was always a Fred Allen chuckle in it. Santayana was very different. When he had discarded his black Spanish cloak and sat facing us, and spread out his notebook for a lecture, he looked the ideal Spanish gentleman, with his flashing black eyes, pointed beard, and baldish forehead. His voice had often a soft and purring tone, as with quick flash of a smile he spoke in a diction as perfect as in his published books. Though he handled the English language as if he owned it, there was something in the very perfection of that jeweled and enameled style more suited to a prose poem on the life of the spirit than to the sharp accuracy of good argument. I met him only once at all intimately. It was when I went of an evening to take one of my orals for the doctorate. T h e

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dark paneled room with its two lights, one down on the table, one upward in the far corner, the deep leather seats, the proffered cigarette, the courteous friendliness, left the visitor from Indiana quite impressed. T h e examination was a pleasant conversation, which mentioned Leibniz and his philosophy written to specifications, and Kant, with his wrong kind of subjectivism. W e were interrupted by another visitor, some Harvard man, who suggested a visit to an odd restaurant in Boston, where "things happened." " D o they get drunk?" questioned Santayana. " N o , b u t — o t h e r things." " W e l l , we don't mind those other things," said Santayana quietly. T h i s man, I thought, does not quite belong to puritan Boston. T w o later men interested me greatly. W i t h Samuel Alexander I had only one slight contact, in that he commented on my review of a book by him, " T h a t young fellow is sassy but f u n n y . " H e was a familiar figure around the University of Manchester, England, with his long beard and bicycle, some people half expecting these two would someday tangle. Anecdotes about him were plentiful. For instance there was the time his wife put in his bag enough shirts for a clean one every day for a week's trip. His wife was alarmed at their disappearance on his return, until he began peeling them off his back one by one. Alexander first attracted me by his attempt to establish the mind as solely an activity, awareness, attention, all the content of consciousness originating in the physical world. His other main thesis, "emergent evolution," had as its co-author C. Lloyd Morgan. Historical causation, and there is no other, for mathematical implication is not causation, has a double character of continuity with the past and novelty. Continuity is possible without complete determinism.

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T h e embryologist, filling in all the steps in the development of an egg, the historian, noting the factors that culminated in some historical event, are filling in a series not fully predictable. For every synthesis is something more than its factors. Our mathematics limps on after. " T h e moon laughs at our difficulties of analysis," as she calmly finds her path. Mathematics itself has its aspect of synthesis, and leads occasionally to amazing foresights. Nature while obeying her old laws may add new ones, unpredictable before. T h e term "emergent evolution" is not an answer but a program of further research. Alfred North Whitehead is too big for brief comment. A little man physically, a bit roly-poly, with a cheerful face, he reminded me of a rosy-cheeked kewpie-doll. After an ordinary lifetime as a distinguished mathematician at London and Cambridge, he came to Harvard in the 1920s for another even more brilliant life career as a philosopher. His students tell me he was usually intelligible in class, and I always found him so in conversation. Unfortunately his written style in his more careful books was clouds and sunshine, with a preponderance of clouds. T h e y said of J o h n Stuart Mill he wrote so clearly that everyone saw at once where he was wrong. Nietzsche wrote, " H e who is profound strives for clearness, he who wishes to appear profound strives for obscurity." There was nothing of this latter in Whitehead; he thought he was taking the right road to ultimate clearness, but I wonder if he did not deceive himself? His world of events divided into sub-events, till the smallest are indivisible but not instantaneous, seems to lose its larger structures and permanences in a rush of tiny events like wheat grains rushing into a grain elevator and piling up on what was there before. T h e y are Leibniz' monads

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made momentary, and somehow a physical quiver transforms itself into a psychic shiver and a mirror image of all the past world in something smaller than a nutshell. Confronted by Eddington's well-known yet startling antithesis between the table of the physicist, whirling atomic particles in an almost empty space, and the brown, smooth, solid-looking object we run our hand over, many scientific philosophers tell us there is really no problem. Some say the physicist's table is a conceptual construction, and not a reality like the observable table. Some say the physicist's table is real, and the brown table is subjective, perhaps located in the back of one's head. T h e panpsychist starts out bravely with a contrast between the way the table looks from the inside and from the outside. B u t as developed by a Leibniz or a Whitehead, this turns into an assertion that the brown table is subjective and the physicist's table is a construction of thought. So neither table belongs to the real world, for there is no ordinary objective space according to Leibniz, and Whitehead is Leibniz, as we have said, with the monads made momentary. Whitehead thus solves " t h e bifurcation of Nature" by eliminating both sides. I remain with a stubborn feeling that all these theories are wrong, and there is a brown table and an atomic table both at the same place in an objective space world, and their relation still needs to be explained, not evaded. B u t Whitehead deserves expansion and illustration rather than any attempt to merely summarize or criticize. H e is a philosopher of great range, and has a thousand insights, such as even the ordinary reader can enjoy by reading his little books of lectures. Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Vice-President of India, on a recent visit to the United States, was asked by a reporter

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if there were any recent Western philosophers highly respected in India. He replied that there were indeed, and listed Royce, James, Bergson, and Francis Herbert Bradley. An interesting list. Now, I never met Francis Herbert Bradley, few did. My old friend, Benjamin Rand, was at Harvard merely the keeper of the philosophy books, but to Englishmen he was the great scholar who knew the intellectual life of their ancestors. Still he hesitated about trying to meet the sour recluse, Bradley, for he had heard that, after arguing for years in the journals with William James, Bradley had sent word to James he did not care to meet him. But Rand, on a visit to Oxford, summoned up courage enough to request a chance to call on Bradley. Only a few minutes passed before a slender white-haired gentleman sprang up the steps of Rand's own lodgings, and introduced himself as Francis Herbert Bradley. Bradley was most cordial, and told how he had been revising his Logic, but his publishers had said they wanted a revision of his Ethics first, and to put off the Logic until he was totally senile. It is a pity Bradley is not available for comment on some of our present-day philosophers, in this "best of all possible worlds," where "everything in it is a necessary evil." In his able book translated (1949) as Being and Some Philosophers, Etienne Gilson has described long periods of philosophy as a conflict between the Essentialists and the Existentialists. We are here concerned with a classic controversy, and not with such recent "Existentialism" as the philosophy of the frustrated will of Sartre, that cold gray dawn in which all cows are purple. The older Existentialism, as in Aquinas, made existence an ultimate category, connected with dynamic power and creativity, not reducible to some combination of universals or essences. For

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myself, I find considerable cogency in this view, holding that universals are possibles, and no combination can make a real thing; no matter how well and completely you tell a consistent story it is still only fiction. T h e contrary Essentialist view is the Neo-Platonist view, though both sides are too much influenced in our Western tradition by the Substance-Attribute logic of Aristotle. F o r Gilson, typical of the arguments for the Essentialist side were those of Francesco Suarez, the Spanish Jesuit, though the monist outcome appears alike in Spinoza and Hegel. Suarez I first learned about from an anecdote by Royce. Royce came out of the Harvard Library with a dusty volume of Suarez under his arm. H e was met on the steps by Harvard's President Eliot, who took the volume in his hand, and returned it almost immediately with the comment: " R o y c e , take that book back and put it on the shelf where you found it. T h a t is one of the books which are not read." Gilson speaks in awe of the subtlety and vast learning of Suarez, which should indicate he ought not to be among the unread. T h e monistic Essentialist starts with " t h e flower in the crannied wall," and its blue color calls for light and the Sun, and its position calls for a distance from the Moon, until when you get done God and man and everything else turn out to be predicates, or parts of predicates, of that insignificant posy. T h i s reasoning proceeds by turning relations into predicates, and finally declaring the individuality of the flower consists in the sum of all its predicates. T h e r e is no truth but the whole truth. B u t there is no reason for centering it in this particular flower. It is too unsubstantial to bear such a weight of predicates. It is itself but a predicate of an ultimate and absolute Being, said B r a d l e y — t h e Absolute Reality is such that it is characterized by this "flower-

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ness" and "blueness," conjoined under conditions X not fully here specified. As in the case of a pluralist atomism of beings nothing is relevant to anything else, so here everything is so relevant to everything else that the concept of relevance is deprived of any real meaning, and the concept of truth of any usable application. But Bradley had qualms. As the great Mystics have used all the resources of reasoning to prove the world self-contradictory and only the mystical vision ultimately stable, so Bradley doubts if all the resources of logic and language can equal the sense of reality we get from being out, let us say, amid the sounds and sights and smells of a spring morning. So he becomes a skeptic, fully realizing that it is hard to be a reasoned skeptic about all things, without becoming skeptical about one's reasons. But he is sure the real is no "ballet of bloodless categories." He is the empiricist attacking the supposed rational structure of the world. In his great work, Appearance and Reality, the notorious "disappearance of reality" begins through an attack on relations. You have a collection of terms and relations. But when you try to relate a relation to its terms, that calls for two more relations, and you get into a vicious regress of relations of relations of relations. T o this we may make two replies. One is that you do not first have relations and then relate them. A relation that does not relate is no relation at all. T h e second is that even immediate experience, if it is not a mere blob of delirium, has a relational structure. One case of relation at once proves that relations are not impossibly self-contradictory. T h e immediacy of a summer morn has space relations within it. Perhaps there is some confusion here about what a relation is. Space relations, as James remarks, are themselves spaces, and have a somewhat substantive character.

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Bertrand Russell talks as if when we experienced a brown spot we were sitting in the middle of it. T h e experience of the separation of the motion-picture screen from us and separation of the objects in the picture from one another is as immediate as the objects themselves. Even the baby animal finds himself from the beginning in a three-dimensional world, though it may take some practice to get everything under control. Having condemned relations without having truly realized what they were, Bradley goes on, in the rest of his book, to condemn almost everything else, as being cases of relation and therefore under condemnation as contradictory, until even G o d is found to be "riddled with contradictions." All the adroit eloquence with which Josiah Royce slid across little gaps in his own argument for Absolute Idealism did not suffice to counteract the impression that Bradley left with me, that such a philosophy ends in a self-destructive skepticism, in which there is not enough room for ideals because not enough for possibilities. All is actual and ineffable, and confused. One of my favorite poems is: I am Francis Herbert Bradley, When my liver acts u p badly I take refuge from the brute In the blessed Absolute. I have tried in the above discussions to make clear that I believed in no incorrigible intuitions, even of immediate experience. Some intuitions are obviously corrigible. I recall the story of the man who went to his oculist and complained, "Something wrong with my eyes—I can't see any spots." "What's the idea?", said the doctor, "you are not supposed to see spots before your eyes." " I don't know," he said,

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"but everywhere I go I see a leopard, and I can't see any spots." Again, there was a drunk at midnight who looked over the bridge rail and saw a bright light almost under him. He called to a passer-by, and demanded to know what that light was. " T h e moon," was the answer. "But tell me, how the devil did I get away up here." I see no reason why cases like this should not be explainable without supposing that most of the time, including mornings in spring, we do not see things pretty much as they are. On a night of freezing wind and pouring rain, a friend of mine on the streets of Hartford saw a woman struggling with her umbrella out in the roadway. He offered help, but she said she was out there to attract the bus driver's attention. She was a dear little old lady, somebody's grandma. As he reached the opposite curb he turned back, to see her recovering from being whirled around like a top. He heard a startling expletive, followed however in a clear firm voice by the remark, "Somebody ought to do something about this." This is the perfect characterization of a New England ice storm, and in the midst of one we find it hard to believe our experience is not immediate, but is being done with mirrors. But we also just as normally believe that there is a realm which we enter by thinking, and if we must use language to reach it, it is not the words we are thinking about, but the possibilities. All good language is something more than naming individual existents. It is conceptual, referring to universals, as in common nouns and other forms of speech. With concepts we form propositions, which may have a meaning even though nothing corresponds. T h e i r truth lies outside themselves, but we may play with them without even asking seriously whether they are true in the strict sense.

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I n addition we make interpretations. T h e w o r d "interpretation" has two meanings. T h e one is the analysis of a perception, as when we distinguish between the mountain a n d the blue haze intervening, as well as between what is n o w given and what is remembered. W e interpret what we see. T h e other use is a very different thing, the interpretation of those arbitrary signs called language, by supplying the concepts and intended import of the combination. T h e r e b y we learn not only about things we have never seen, b u t often things we could not possibly see, for example all the negative aspects of the world; and also about other minds, whose thoughts so unlike ours are thus conveyed to us. T h r o u g h such interpretation—and this is Royce's sense of the w o r d — a l l our cultural heritage and the means of understanding it come to us. B u t what is this common world, physical and cultural, w h i c h we come to know through perception, conception, and interpretation? It is a relational world, I would say. W h e t h e r relations are internal to their terms, that, I take it, is a meaningless question, due to turning relations into relational predicates. But relations are internal to one another in such ways that they fall into systems. Sets of relations belong together, are mutually relevant. T h e s e systems are the basis for our scientific analysis of cause and effect, and the real source for induction. W e try, by those imaginative constructions called scientific theories, to arrive at the systems that can be subsequently tested. "Verification" is not the obtaining of new evidence, but the evaluating of it by thought. Induction is not the enumeration of instances, but analysis to find what is connected with what. T h e space-time world is somehow a unity. But time is not simply a fourth dimension of space, else for each new time

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there would be a new space, as a series of cross-sections of a board are different cross-sections. There must be a definite sense in which the space at a distance and the space of yesterday is the space of here-today. Einstein relativity has to do not with extensity but with measurement, operations comparing one extensity with another. It is the same extensity which has the two lengths. But maybe we are here getting too involved in what a student once told me was the real task of philosophy: "Philosophy is finding the best ways and means of keeping the universe together." When we deal with possibilities which are not actualized we come up against the negative side of the world, which, though universal and not particular fact, is just as much fact as the positive side. Language may often say something negatively or positively with equal facility. Between the blue and the non-blue may be a third alternative, the bluish. There is no alternative, however, to the great alternative, " T o be or not to be." T h a t dichotomy is fundamental to the character of the existent, as contrasted with the possible. In the horrid parody of Wordsworth, But now she's gone, And oh, the difference to she. T h e difference between being and non-being is absolute. T o say there is something having, or not having, a specific character [Russell's3 x. fx] is to say what is often important. But to say something is true in all cases [Russell's (x). fx] is to make a much less meaningful remark. When you say, "Whatever x may be, if x is a blue-eyed mermaid, then—oh boy!" the first clause does not add anything except metaphysical puzzles about the "all." Take the old example, " A l l men are mortal." Existent mortal men are not part of the import of this statement—add a million more, or sub-

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tract, and there will be no effect on its truth. It is therefore not empirically testable by the Logical Positivists' standard, a n d they ought to declare it meaningless. For them the only test of "All men are mortal" is to find or ultimately fail to find a man who lived forever, and for that we must wait till the end of time, which is not something empirically observable. "All men are mortal" means " N o man lives forever," and this is an existential negative. T h e notion of "all" is only a pseudo-positive one: "that's all there is, there isn't any more." I believe the notion of "all," like the notion of "the sunrise," is an extraordinarily convenient popular term, but scientifically speaking it has no standing. And the first place to which I would apply this conclusion would be such statements as, " T h e individual is the sum of all his predicates" with its implied law of "the identity of indiscernibles," and " T h e universe is all there is." T h i s last belongs with the deeply emotional thought, " T h e divine is rightly so called." T h e existent world is only part of what is possible, but I doubt any great significance to the thought of "all the possible worlds." I recall one sobering remark f r o m Santayana, "Maybe the world will turn out, in the long run, to be very different from what we think it is." But we have no reason to hold this as probable. Knowledge of the possible, however, is necessary for wisdom and good conduct. Intelligence combined with imagination, and there is no other intelligence, may produce from time to time a masterpiece of science, literature, philosophy, or, perchance, a masterpiece of living.

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I RECALL an evening session of the Harvard Philosophical Club, now many years ago. It was in honor of the German philosopher Rudolf Eucken. I remember Professor Ralph Barton Perry rising to greet our guest and obviously wondering just what he, a realist, could say in praise of Eucken, an idealist; for we took realism and idealism seriously in those days. I saw Perry glance out of the corner of his eye at the smiling guest of the evening, whose somewhat ruddy face was bordered by Santa Claus whiskers. Finally Perry came out with a somewhat grudging word of praise, "Well, at least this you can say of our good friend, that he looks like a philosopher, anyway." There were other speakers, including T . S. Eliot, who got embarrassed by forgetting the thirdly, at the end of his speech. But even more I remember the suave Gustave Feingold, our chairman, introducing the main speaker of the evening, as being "the man whom we all would most like to resemble." And then Hugo Münsterberg rose to dominate the scene, his famous watch chain draped across his ample corporosity, the bald head, the glasses being switched around at times, the Kaiser William mustache with the upturned ends. And speaking from the lofty eminence of the Fichtean Idealist, with that inimitable accent never heard before or since, he was say-

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ing: "Zees pragmatisms, zees new realisms, ve velcomes zem all, and ve forgiffs zem all. Zay haff efferyting. Zay haff efferyting egzept a V u r l d . " Being a realist like Perry, I did not think too highly of the speech at the time, nor do I yet think that Fichtean Absolute Idealism gives us a world. B u t I have come to realize that we cannot analyze the world unless we have been inclusive enough to bring in a fairly complete w o r l d to analyze. As I tried to follow, in Miinsterberg or in greater thinkers like Royce and Bradley, the arguments of the "eternal" point of view which includes all lesser insights, I seemed to sense confusion introduced by Aristotelian subject-predicate logic. Relations get reduced to "relational predicates," potentialities to "dispositional predicates," and differences and absences of relation to "negative predicates." Everything becomes part of the predicates of everything else, and a single thing, once it is the sum of all its predicates, becomes the universe. Activities, seemingly transactions of a thing with other things, get turned into relations and so again into "relational predicates," frozen as in the activities of Spinoza's G o d or Nature into "changeless change," the eternal. T h i s brings us to the subject of time. "I know what time is when you do not ask me," said Augustine, which is to evade the question. Does time flow forward, or does it flow backward from the future, to take permanent residence in the past? It might flow in cycles, or in one cycle and come back to this identical present moment. If we emphasize the before-and-after aspect of time, time might be thought of as immobilized into an unchanging dimension of the world, across which we pass like an automobile across a stationary landscape. Such might have been the view of physical sci-

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ence, if the "degradation of energy" had not indicated that the landscape itself was moving and in only one invariable direction, "time's arrow." T h i s is confirmed by the "recession of the nebulae." Present figures indicate the spiral nebulae are twice as far away as we thought, and four times as bright, allowing for a longer time since they were bunched together, six trillion years perhaps, but not an infinite past. Some people, such as the Roman Pontiff, find in the new science confirmation of a Creator. Kant said setting the limits of time and space was beyond the powers of the human mind. Today, on the contrary, even the science-fiction magazines are being excelled by the deductions of sober scientists. Royce declared an infinite velocity was a contradiction, and today the top limit for Einstein is a mere 186,000 miles a second. Royce whimsically imagined an inextensible rod stretched from here to infinity. He pulls it three feet this way, and it comes three feet out of infinity at the far end. Today the Einstein universe has no end, but that is because it "recurves" and is limited in volume. Others suggest that maybe there is an infinite space, but the distances between the nebulae are expanding so that the further ones break through the "light barrier" and thereafter no light signals can come back, while new matter is very gradually appearing out of nothingness here, to fill the place of those nebulae that have "left us." So time may be endless both directions. What would Kant say now? T h e past-present-future aspect of time raises a further question not contained in before-after, What is the present? One week the newspapers report the physicist as measuring events one billionth of a second in length; by the next week the minimum becomes one trillionth. But every interval

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breaks up, however short, into a past-present-future. Is the present only an indivisible instant, a knife-edge, and is nothing real now of the past which was, and the future which is not yet? T h e n we ourselves never experience the real world, for our experiences have length, a h u m p of time, the "specious present" of W i l l i a m J a m e s . Also, the relativity theory denies simultaneity at a distance, so the knife-edge of real existence gets badly broken. Royce, discussing melodies, and W h i t e h e a d , rhythms, have pointed out features of the world not reducible to instants, or even to short events. Royce speculates that in the world of Nature there might be conscious beings with timespans different from ours, minds for whom a dynamite explosion would last a long time, or the "eternal hills" waste away rapidly. B u t the apprehension of time by a mind, Royce thought, has in it a character that transcends time. T h e perceiving of a melody is not confined to one of the notes. Consciousness is a foretaste of eternity. Imagine a mind that takes in the whole sweep of time in one synoptic apprehension, and we have Royce's " E t e r n a l Absolute." As Royce quoted Browning, I felt there was here a certain confusion between " t h e instant made eternity" and eternity made an instant. O r more precisely, thought does transcend the moment, as in perceiving a melody, but the time of apprehension is still itself in time, perhaps at the time the melody is finished, or after the first bars, if the melody is a familiar one. Has the Absolute heard the tune before? Let us return from these dizzy regions to some philosophers who have "taken time seriously," as past-presentfuture, and not an eternal now. One of them was Bergson. His influence on Proust and Sorel is suggestive of possible contacts of philosophy with our social and cultural situa-

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tion. I went to hear Bergson in his prime (1911) at the Collège de France. George Conger, later professor at Minnesota, and I used to sit and wait on a backless bench for two hours and a half. We were there before, during, and after another lecture given in the same room by a great French economist. Prior to Bergson's first lecture, the great ladies of Paris sent their footmen to hold a seat. T h e crowd grew so great that the footmen had to stay and listen to the lecture. As I concluded, a French lecture room had a certain amount of air enclosed in it when first built, and the air has been there ever since, and so it seemed in this instance. There were a few hardy climbers peering through the smoky, tightly closed windows at the first lecture, though they could hear nothing. Later, as I recall, there was a fist fight for a seat with a back to it on the front row. The door in the back of the hall collapsed on two or three occasions, under pressure of those outside trying to get a look at Bergson. Bergson was a charming little man, very neat, with a baldish head, prominent nose, and a Charlie Chaplin mustache. The big eyebrows over his sharp eyes emphasized important points or bits of humor with a sudden lift. If he was, as someone has said, part Irish and part Jewish, the combination made a perfect Frenchman. His style of presentation was the ideal in literary art. He was a great man. There was a thrill, years later, for all of us in his last public act when, a dying man, he was helped down the street to the Nazi registration office, and defiantly wrote, "Henri Bergson, Jew." It is now the fashion to say he was an irrationalist, who wrote in confused metaphors instead of real arguments. I admit he drew antitheses not quite accurate between reason and intuition. But there was also a good amount in him of

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the genuine empiricist, who tried to look at things as they are. And there was a quantity of sound and detailed analysis. I remember his holding up his hand, with fingers and thumb spread out, to indicate how the great trends of evolution had diverged. I gathered, though, that it was the qualitative aspects of the world which appealed to him, its endless riches, rather than the march of time. And so he spoke of all the riches of the past being carried on into the present, with nothing lost. I was more impressed by his freewill arguments. As long as you think of man at a crossroad, choosing the right or the left fork, you will always find a reason for the choice, and therefore find determinism. But life and mind do not come to a fork in the road; they create the divided path itself in a process whose outcome is unforeseeable, unless you follow it through at its own pace, and therefore unpredictable by skipped intermediaries. T h e question comes back, I would say, to whether there is psychical causation. We do seem to guide ourselves intelligently. Is that only physical causation, or is there something more? If the latter, then freedom wins, since the talk of stronger motives prevailing is meaningless; for how shall we measure the strength of motives, except as they win? I recall that Bergson also lectured on Spinoza, and I have often wished those lectures might be published. In his shortened period of lecturing that year he got through Book I of Spinoza's Ethics, sentence by sentence. T h e ladies in the audience followed his reading of the text in their own Latin editions, and nodded assent to his beautiful translations. Spinoza is the great rationalist and the great naturalist philosopher, but Bergson's sympathy with him ran deep, and with Plotinus. I think Bergson was a naturalist at heart. What he wanted was life, and not mind; novelty, but not

VALUES necessarily wisdom. W h e n Spinoza says, " T h e order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of bodies," he was saying, if I understand him aright, that physical causation calls all the figures of the dance. T h e ideas are the truths about the physical world, and what is parallel to Spinoza's Attribute of Extension are just the eternal truths. But since Spinoza is a nominalist who tolerates no abstract truths, these truths must be realities, the thoughts of God. T h e intellect is naturally eternal and never mistaken. O u r intellect, so far as we have one, is itself part of the eternal order of truths. T h e intellect sees everything under the aspect of eternity; it is only our body that changes, although the intellect knows the truth about that. Only taking it so, can we understand in Spinoza the apparent sudden transition to the eternal in the second half of Book V of the Ethics. Bergson, I think, liked this. T h e intuitive intellect was not too different from Bergson's term "intuition." H e was critical of human intellect as too meager, and thus unable to understand concrete change. Bergson thought of himself as the first philosopher to take time seriously, but I wonder if he did? Bergson loved the richness of the world, and cared not at all for the plan or goal of it. A philosopher who tried to take time more seriously still was J o h n Dewey. T h e range of his inquiries was enormous, still alertly moving forward at the age of ninety and beyond. His style improved with much practice, but it was always inadequate to his thought. Critics mistook his tentative suggestions for finalities, and thought he contradicted himself —symbolic perhaps was an old typewriter he owned, which produced lines that crossed one another at odd angles. W h e n asked why he did not make a system of philosophy he

VALUES answered simply that he did not know enough yet. He was at his best in extemporaneous criticism; in lectures he was too much concerned with wrestling with the subject to bother about the auditors. My recollections of Dewey most often go back more than thirty years, an evening philosophy session, some student reading a paper. Dewey sits inconspicuously in a corner, resting comfortably on the back of his neck, one boot waving out in front. His finger tips are pressed together, he observes everything from behind thick glasses, his dark mustache is neatly trimmed, his mop of graying hair runs in parallel lines to no particular destination. After the reading there is for some time confused discussion, and then Dewey clears his throat and begins in a somewhat drawling voice with a question or two. Everyone else falls silent. His approach is kindly and understanding. He sees what the reader was trying to say and wishes to develop it further. His students suddenly discover they can think too. There are many anecdotes about him. I like the one he told on himself, teaching the experimental approach to his boy. The boy stopped up the outlets in the bathroom, and when Dewey arrived, the boy was sitting calmly in the midst of the flood. Before his father could comment, the boy spoke up, "Don't stop to ask questions, John, get a mop." The son of a German professor at Trinity College, Hartford, named Spaulding uttered one of the classic remarks about the Dewey progressive education—it may have been said more than once. Anyhow, the boy came up to the teacher before the day began, and said, "Teacher, do we have to do just what we want to all day today again?" Dewey's influence on American education, making it over in the so-called "progressive" direction, has been far

VALUES greater than any other philosopher or educator, though it all, of course, goes back to Rousseau. It has spread to other parts of the world, though not much to Europe. Much of the world was not ready for his synthesis of democracy and a rule of genuine experts, or for an education shrewd enough to cherish and use what was great in the past without endlessly recapitulating it. T h e Russians tried progressive schools after the Revolution, and Dalton, Massachusetts, site of a project method, got metamorphosed into an imaginary Lord Dalton. But such freedom could not last. Dewey traveled to Japan and China after World War I, because individual educators there had been attracted by this democratic approach. But he said on returning, that officially the Japanese had pumped him dry of every fact he knew, and then politely put him on a shelf; the Chinese had been equally polite but put him on the shelf at once. I scandalized a good disciple of Dewey's by saying, "As an empirical philosopher, Dewey is a great dialectician." I meant no harm, I like dialectic; but in Dewey's case, as often elsewhere, dialectic does not always clear things up. You get hold of a term like "experience" or "environment," and think you have said something definite. When anybody says "experience," I want to know whose experience. I want to ask about "environment" whether it is the known environment or the full environment, including all that is acting on the organism. I picture Dewey as a man a bit afraid of his own temperament, but as naturally a dreamer and thinker. So he says, "Let us stop dreaming, and get down to business." As Plato the poet turned puritan and burned his poetry and wanted to throw all the other poets out of the State, so Dewey would reject far-flung excursions into the future. He would consider those daydreams alone justified

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which could be implemented by the means for bringing them to pass. One should proceed step by step, in a manner flexible, opportunist. So a friend of mine is convinced Dewey has done harm. He says, " T h e man has turned us away from the ends of life to the means, from the great permanent values to the pursuit of unimportant details. I tell you the man has no standards, no real values. And so look what he has done to our schools!" T o this my reply about the schools would be that they seem to me provably better than they once were. Dewey was indeed an educational theorist but also a believer in experimental democracy; one who would give everybody a chance to use his talents and his creativity, for thus is society itself most benefited. "Try all things, and hold fast to that which is good." Dewey thought of intelligence as problem solving rather than world building. You turn on intelligence only when you are in trouble. When you get out of the difficulty, you lay aside the instrument, and plunge into the flow of experience again. Intelligence is practical, instrumental to living; it all sounds quite Bergsonian. Dewey has brought all problem solving together, pointing out its sameness, from the highest reaches of scientific inquiry to the simplest problem of daily living. You have a problem, you have a general "hunch" how to solve it, you think out the details of how to try your new "idea" out; you do really try it, it works, that is that. For a moment you have used imagination and reasoning; now forget them and enjoy life. I object. I do not like intelligence to disappear, nor imagination. I have analyzed for myself actual cases of our most practical judgments, for I hold that every judgment we make, every proposition we think, is a "hunch," a hypothesis. I picture myself thinking up a choice of two ways of doing things. I try one and it

VALUES succeeds. Is that the end? No. T h e other one might have succeeded better. I try them both. Is that enough? No, I need to compare them and their results, which comparing is an intellectual activity. I now find one way is indeed better, so I generalize tentatively for future action. But this rule is an intellectual thing, a meaning and not an enjoyment. We may have single experiences of prizing or valuing. But these become not merely the basis for evaluating themselves, but the basis for testing much larger constructions, whole systems of culture or civilization, which as a whole we never merely value or prize. T h e relation of the single valuing to the evaluation of such a large system is like the relation of one pointer-reading to a great physical system. May I add three further comments. T h e first is rather technical, a matter of logic. When we verify, as we say, a hypothesis, we verify not it but its consequences. We do not verify particles; we verify the results that particles produce, as for instance in a Wilson cloud chamber. We reason, if A, then B; and we verify B. T h e conclusion that A is true is a fallacy, that of affirming the consequent: "If someone is a Communist, he uses words. This fellow uses words. Hence, he is a Communist." We therefore should look for the possible rival hypotheses, and refute them, so as to leave A the only possible predecessor of B. Or we refute A itself, by proving B is false. In either case we seek to establish a negative. But as I have been pointing out in previous chapters, you do not establish negatives by direct observations, or by plunging back into unintellectualized experience. T h e Dewey account is oversimplified. Besides, as the French physicist Duhem has made clear, practically any test of one hypothesis tests several of them at once; and it may be one of the others which is at fault.

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My second comment is about the dangers of the subjective tone in Dewey's account of problem solving. W h e n solving a problem there are data which you accept as the facts. But these are the known facts. U n k n o w n facts cannot shape the subjective process. T h e known facts themselves are always subject to re-examination in the f u t u r e . So says Dewey. But this is a subjective realm, out of touch with real problems. You calculate the best way to propitiate the demons who are causing your friend's illness. W h i l e you are doing that, the bacteria kill your friend. In practice you cannot isolate a problem from the real facts a n d consider only the known facts, and the real facts are not subject to revision. When you deal with people, it is the people themselves who are important, and not merely your ideas about them. Democracy itself demands that you consider other people as distinguishable from your ideas of them. In this sense you cannot isolate problem solving from ontology. In Professor Lamprecht's Woodbridge Lectures he pointed out two sorts of limits to present activity. T h e y were, in his Aristotelian terminology, the " m a t t e r " of the world, which he identified with the past on which we build, and the "form" of the world, which is constituted by the laws of Nature. We build on the past, and within the limits of rather permanent fixed laws. We still have room to move, but not in every direction. Apparently not so in Dewey's world. Dewey's world flows, everything Hows. In the f u t u r e we find out the past was not what we thought it was; in the f u t u r e we note the laws of Newton are replaced by the laws of Einstein. Is Dewey here transacting business with real things, or only within his own mind? We are confronted by two great worlds, the world of Nature, and the world of Culture. Both must be admitted to be largely unchanged by

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any particular problem solving we may do. T h e world of C u l t u r e is a complex creation of many minds. W e succeed only by great effort in taking over our share in our vast cultural heritage, and in doing so we do not plunge back, into unintellectualized immediacy. M y third comment has to do with Dewey's determination to consider democracy as proceeding experimentally, step by step, giving everyone a chance, trying each suggestion, dictating to others no long-range plans or permanent ideals. T h e very soberness of the process commends it to me. I, too, want real achievement, and not rhetoric about our way of life and the ideals of the founding fathers. Unfortunately, people are moved more by propaganda than by reason. As a matter of practical politics, there are rival philosophies, already proceeding rather recklessly on the other road, and getting converts. T h e y inspire their followers to use of brutal means, because of a rainbow of the ideal out yonder down the road. T h e new ideal is all the more appealing to men w h o are unhappy just because it is not fully defined, except that it is going to be different, oh so different! Nietzsche came before the age of the Nazi and the Communist, but he was an observer of an earlier Socialism. T o summarize what he said in Human, All Too Human: "Socialism is the fantastic younger brother of almost decrepit despotism, but it wants such state power as only despotism has possessed. Striving to abolish all existent states, it can only hope here and there to gain power occasionally, and by means of extreme terrorism. So it silently prepares for reigns of terror, and drives the word 'justice' like a nail into the heads of the half-cultured masses, in order to deprive them of any good sense they ever did have." A n d he added, in The Will for Power: " N o t h i n g is more amusing than to observe

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the discord between the poisonous a n d desperate faces of contemporary socialists, a n d the childish lamblike happiness of their hopes for the f u t u r e . " Such combinations of rosy ideals a n d ruthless means are very dangerous to us. Suppose Czech authorities were to p u t down a revolt with indiscriminate massacre of quarter of a million people. It would be no attack on the United States, b u t could warmhearted Americans take it calmly? I think Nietzsche has correctly indicated how people are moved, not by carefully planned answers to little problems, but by far-flung visions of the ideal. If the peoples of the earth follow what is offered to them elsewhere, is it not due to the fact that we are today holding u p before them no great soul-satisfying hope, b u t only the chance to be like us, motorcars and Coca-Cola? We are on the defensive, as we were not when Dewey first wrote. We are not proving to the rest of the world that our way of life is worth having. Democracy need not be mediocrity. Sooner or later those who for the moment are deceived by the Marxians will begin to ask, " W h a t do we get, if we get the classless society?" T h e n it is for America to be ready with a philosophy as concrete as Dewey's, but bolder, something constructive, inventive, of high imagination; something that will inspire and also convince intellectually, an adequate and full social philosophy. What are philosophers doing to provide such a philosophy? T h e limits of this book will make it impossible to discuss more fully the other philosophers who take time seriously— such men as Samuel Alexander and A. N. Whitehead—or the philosophy of history as such. But I do want to add something more about the great areas of value, particularly aesthetics, ethics, and religious philosophy. In aesthetics my own ideas are much shaped by the place

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I would give to the constructive imagination, and to the theory that sensory richness is a late acquisition rather than something primitive. Contrary to Croce, I take sensory intuition as coming late in evolution. Man was an actor before he was a conternplator. Whitehead, like Schopenhauer, places feeling, more or less confused, at the root of things, because, as Whitehead said, "I do not want an empty world," but a world in which each element is alive with prehensions of much that has gone before. Royce said physical nature is mind unrevealed. Leibniz said it was a mass of sleeping monads. Panpsychism tends to get bizarre. I would not wholly reject panpsychist interpretations as impossible, but we have no real clue to the insides of alien things, if they have any. Fundamental, indeed, to great art is highly developed feeling and sensuous quality, but combined, as Miss Helen Parkhurst has well brought out in her discussion of music in her book entitled Beauty, with great organizations, constructions of the imagination. T h e great works of art contain inner resources of potentiality that seem inexhaustible, the beautiful and the characteristic, balance and harmony and style, expressing the mind and revealing the world, appealing at once to sense and intellect. We have here a new and higher synthesis of the sensuous and the imaginative. Turning to moral and religious values, we note that recent ethical philosophy breaks in two, giving us, on the one hand, the ethics of duty, obligation and the right, referred to popularly as intuitive ethics, and on the other, the ethics of value and the good, referred to as the empirical ethics of trial and error, or awkwardly as "naturalistic" ethics. Thought and reason get left out. Bergson has written a notable book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion,

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concerning the mechanical religion of the law and the higher spiritual religion of the prophets. T h e r e have been great reformers among the supreme prophets, but I think Bergson's distinction is largely upside down. H e associates intelligence solely with the practical and lower morality. B u t most intuitionists are not the representatives of a higher morality. Nine-tenths of the intuitional prophets and revivalists are pleading with us to turn back to the good old religion, saying emotionally, " M y mother's religion is good enough for m e , " or " L e t us not like the scientists offer our prayers to our father who lived up a coconut tree," but rather let us turn " f r o m the age of rocks to the R o c k of Ages." It is very satisfying to say this sort of thing. As one such preacher told me, " W h e n you are giving the people a pungent sense of their sins, then is when you are having a whale of a good time." W e find the same temper in the political witch-hunters and burners of books, the fanatics generally. Since Kant no one can overlook the place of will in moral conduct. As the economist Alfred Marshall observed, one of the inescapable problems in building an economic order is to secure the honest fulfillment of simple obligations. Before sheer lack of will we stand helpless. M o t h e r says, " T o m m y , aren't you ashamed to be in bed so late in the morning?" "Yes'm." " W e l l , why don't you get up, then?" " I ' d rather be ashamed." Yet emphasis on will alone is often purely negative, as when mother says, " G o see what J o h n n y is doing now, and tell him not to." A recent preacher was contrasting the kindly emotions with " t h e rule of ruthless intellect as in H i t l e r . " Hitler as intellect, indeed! It is volition and emotion, not intellect, that sro stumbling for' ' o O

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ward, and become what Mecklin described as "the blind pull and haul of stubborn uncompromising wills." T h e will can be established in good habits by thoughtfully guided early training, teaching the young to take pleasure in good deeds. But I have always been on the side of the intellect in wise conduct, the employment of reason and imagination, if we are to be "not merely good but good for something." I refer to what Erskine called "the moral obligation to be intelligent." T h e r e may be something of intellect in the low cunning of the criminal, but he lacks the imaginative power to put himself in another's place. Warner Fite has stressed intelligence as the basis for any morality that is to do more good than harm in this vastly complex world of today. George Herbert Palmer once told us that he thought, if it would only be of help, "children ought to be spanked for being stupid." Moral intuitions are dim-sighted, undiscriminating. T h e y are also acquired; there are, as Locke said long ago, "no innate ideas." Moral intuitions are the heritage of our past and the pressure of our social order. T h o u g h t , not intuition, must find us the better road. My own teaching of ethics used to start with William G. Sumner's Folkways, and its vast array of illustrative examples that inspired Ripley. Sumner discussed in even horrifying detail what Montaigne and Locke had indicated earlier, namely the heterogeneity of intuitive moral standards. Exposing babies, burying grandmothers alive, leaving grandfathers to starve, these things have been done, and perhaps to stifle any feeling of compassion done brutally, done in the sacred name of duty. Where is there any conduct so vicious to us that it has not somewhere been approved?

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Scarcely a human being today does not have ancestors who ate human flesh. T h e widespread taboo against close intermarriage turns out to be based not on good biological reasons, but on many causes such as dislike of social confusion. It is all deeply irrational. T h e Australian black whose wife died took bloody revenge on someone at random in a neighboring tribe, and came home happy and serene to face the white man's punishment, for his conscience now was clear. " T h e mores can make anything right," said Sumner. It is not so important what the value is of what we do; it is important only that we do it. It is fundamentally imperative that the society should make its members feel they are under control. How vividly Dostoevsky painted the inescapable pressure, in Crime and Punishment! One is almost afraid to speak a word of criticism against the intuitive sense of duty and obligation, however blind, when the old evils it was directed against are so resurgent in our society today—cowardice, selfishness, debauchery, brutality and gangsterism, hypocrisy and indifference. Yet, in such noble forms as national pride and loyal patriotism, duty may work havoc with the very ideals it is intending to defend. In World War I we feared our mixed population might not respond to the call of national duty. So what an explosion we released of patriotic fervor! President Wilson marched down Fifth Avenue, with his silk-hatted Cabinet abreast of him curb to curb. T h e drums beat, the guns boomed, the many bands played, the citizen who failed to salute even one of the innumerable flags got his hat knocked into the street. Finally the pressure on the young men became so tense throughout the land that everybody laughed in relief at the story of the woman interrogating the ablebodied young man milking the cow. "Why aren't you at the

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front?" said she. He replied, "No milk up at that end, ma'am." Things went so badly for our hopes that the next time we were a little ashamed of our heroics. In World War II and the Korean episode the young men went quietly without much rah-rah stuff, but of course they went. "It is a bad job, but we must get it over with." At Gallipoli in World War I the English lost two battles. Through stupid miscalculation in the naval attack they had failed to take the Straits. And then Moseley had been allowed to follow the call of duty— he had joined up and been shot in the head by a Turkish bullet. In our present consciousness about the atom, we know that the premature death of the man who discovered atomic numbers may have cost England more than the failure to take Constantinople. So we introduced "selective service." That was wise, but how strongly our emotions still continue to run the other way! We feel it is against democracy—every young man should have an equal right to get shot. There is a wonderful chance for the demagogue to jeer, "The rich boys are hiding in college fox-holes." Nobody dares openly say, "Excused." We must phrase it, "Deferred service." The pressures are very strong, and the best young men feel them most. Even the atomic scientists are torn by inner conflicts. Even those most opposed to the trend, the conscientious objector or the traitor new-style, show the strain of social pressure by the narrowing and stultification of their powers of sensible reason, and the dislocation of the emotions, in minds otherwise often quite acute. A thoughtful and far-seeing philosophy now gets contemptuously referred to as an "ideology." T h e brave men of Korea fight brother against brother as the result of a carelessly drawn line of latitude, and each is sure that duty calls.

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H e i n e wrote of Kant and his philosophy, a n d of the good burghers who met Kant on his afternoon walks in Königsberg, that had they known what world-upsetting thoughts were going through that man's head, they would have shrunk from him as from an executioner. But they did not know, they saw in him only a professor of philosophy, and they said, "Good afternoon, H e r r Kant," and set their watches. Heine intended to exaggerate, but, in a sense which Heine doubtless did not mean, Kant makes a catastrophic turning point for the good old Germany. As Dewey quotes in a sentence with "only a comma in the middle" f r o m Bernhardi, "Kant gave the Germans the categorical imperative, and Scharnhorst added the idea of universal military service." Kant dreamed of universal peace, and ushered in the period of total wars. I remember how Royce had convinced himself that the ideal of loyalty was the noblest of our ethical emotions, and then was driven to a wild anger when his old German friends gave their blind devotion to a national gangsterism. It is odd that the ethical life, the Kantian conscious autonomous self-guidance that gives a man self-respect, should precisely be the unseen hand of dominating social control firmly laid on his shoulder. Service to country on the battlefield is a great and necessary duty, but in this modern world a wiser use of human resources may become absolutely essential to our survival. We clearly need the guidance of a philosophy of the good, the really good. T h e r e is an oughtness based on the rational good, and a good based on the dynamic sense of duty which is social pressure, and they are today far from coinciding. Not merely is there diversity of standards of the good between savage and civilized man, or between totalitarian and democrat, but there is vast confusion among us under one

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and the same tradition. May I give a variety of illustrations. W e rise in violent anger when a doctor ventures on the mercy killing of a child. Yet we read, " T w o hundred or more thousand children injured by the American automobile last year," and it is only a bit of statistics, nothing to worry about. O u r children mirror back to us our own contradictions, sometimes in amusing yet half-tragic ways. T h e little Quaker girl, isolated on a farm, is playing school with dolls her parents have selected to avoid race prejudice. A visitor says, "Have all the little babies been good in school today?" She answers, to the parents' horror, "All except Magnolia, and I can't do a thing with that darned nigger." Another little girl in the Middle West is supposedly safely asleep in the dark upstairs, when suddenly she drops down on the company below, dressed in nothing at all. Before the parents can take action, she has pointed with outstretched arms and stamping foot to the men in the group, one by one. "You—or you—or you left the toilet seat up, and I darn near drowned." I tell this, not for the Chic Sale humor, b u t as a perfect illustration of how in the same society the same situation can lead to utterly diverse reactions, real tragedy as the little girl sees it, hilarity in her elders. Even the old religion takes strange twists with the young of today. T h e little girl is putting one of two dolls to bed ceremoniously. "What's the baby's name?" says the visitor. "That's the baby Jesus." "And the other one?" "Oh, that's the baby sitter. Joseph and Mary have gone to the night club." In these confusions where can the philosopher find the standard of the good? Old standards often suffice to meet problems of the private individual, if he wills to do what he thinks is right, for these are standard situations. It is in social ethics, the great social problems, where we find no guid-

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ance to lead us amid the vast intricacy of our too little understood civilization. I think many would agree that we must try to find guidance by more knowledge of social science and social fact, and as hypotheses to be put to further test, where possible by trial and experiment. But what marks the success of the experiment? I have never thought that pleasure was the answer, even the greatest pleasure of the greatest number. " T h e young should be taught to take pleasure in the good," but that does not tell us what the good is. Pleasures fall into separate private atoms. We go to the football game for the tensions and thrills. Yet if someone found out how to broadcast the tensions and thrills without any of the game, I do not think we would care for it. George Eliot speaks of experiences so close to pain that we might think them unendurable, were they not the experiences we prefer above all the rest of the whole wide world. Is the good something called happiness? Yes, if we recognize that the happy man is one so engrossed in an activity that calls out all aspects of his nature, and he is so taken out of himself into an ideal beyond himself, that he never even stops to ask, " A m I happy?" Is the good the goal of interest, or is it satisfaction, or maybe satisfaction in the long run? T h e moral good must be connected with our emotions, and thus made dynamic for us, but so also must the truth we are seeking take hold of us emotionally. Human nature is such that a merely intellectual process does not come alive for us or lead us on. But just as in a scientific theory what we seek is not a set of pointer readings as such, and still less some private feelings of triumph, so in our final choice of the good, the good itself is indeed that which satisfies, but it

VALUES satisfies because it is also more objective than the whole series of our private satisfactions. I was early pleased by the theory of Albert P. Brogan, later a dean at the University of Texas, and his colleague, Professor Edwin T . Mitchell, that the fundamental concept in evaluation was the better and the worse, not the good and bad. Brogan decided as far back as 1 9 1 2 that, for the logical ordering of the field, we could define the good as "that the existence of which is better than its non-existence." T o me this had the advantage of defining the good as related to possibilities of existence, and not to essences as such. It also led me to question whether the series of the better and the worse has a top, "the perfect." T h e series of fat people does not have a top, the supremely, perfectly fat man. We compare fat people by such criteria as scales and tape measure, but the tape does not have to be fat. T h e concept of the perfect seems to me one of the less perfect of our concepts, in spite of the magic name of Plato. Just what is Perfect Beauty, and is it beautiful? May not "perfection" be a pseudo-idea, like "the all"? But what then of God? When William Ernest Hocking came to Harvard, Bertrand Russell asked me, "Who's Hocking?" I said, " H e wrote a book about G o d . " He looked up quickly, and inquired, "What's he know about God?" T h a t may have been unfair to Hocking, who was considering what God has signified in the thoughts of men. But it expresses something of my own diffidence. A friend of mine, after reading a history of philosophy, queried, " W h y does every philosopher talk about God? T h a t seems to be the subject they know least about." It is a humbling thought. T h e discussion of what the philosophers have said about religion and its

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values is beyond the range of our discussion here, and is better found in such a collection of source-material as Philosophers Speak of God (1953), by Charles Hartshorne and W. L. Reese. " T h e most interesting things about a man," said William James, "are his overbeliefs." I have never been too deeply stirred by the overbeliefs of religion, so I am doubtless not an interesting person. As a philosopher I tended to say the question is not, Do you believe? but What is the evidence?—as in a court of law. When Santayana said in class, "Jesus was not a philosopher, or even an intellectual," I remember I felt disturbed. But I agreed when he added, " A philosopher may, from a sheer determination to be fair, not wish to reject offhand the beliefs of many wise and thoughtful men through many generations." I found myself saying then that the good must be embodied to be good, and if there is no God, there ought to be. But what sort of a God? An existent God, I thought, having potentialities in my sense (not Aristotle's), because he has personality and a power to display sympathy and loving-kindness. I was interested to find that Dewey, despiser of daydreams and of means that are merely means, found a dream God, a mere essence, enough for Man's needs. Such a God would not be a personality, and personality is itself a high value. Santayana and Russell feared and disliked power as power. I was amused, therefore, when Russell told me about the morning after the Titanic sank. He came into T r i n i t y College, Cambridge, and the old charwoman looked up at him with the comment, "It was terrible about the big boat, wasn't it?" Russell replied, "Yes, and they said that boat could not be sunk." T h e old woman raised herself and pointed upwards. "Ah, Mr. Russell, they forgot. They forgot there is One above what can sink any boat." I agreed with

VALUES Russell it would be no great gain to endow a powerful being with personality, if he were going to use his power in sports like this. O u r Personalist philosophers take, unwisely I think, the usual Idealist road, "All is minds and their knowledge." T h e i r pluralism of persons gets upset by what seems to me an inevitable dialectic. I know A, you know B, b u t who knows the full relationship between A and B, if all is known? Only an overarching, an absolute mind. T h i s is the Absolute Mind of Royce and Miinsterberg. T h e Absolute is a being "who knows in full what we know only in part, and truly is what we only strive to be." I do not feel I want to be T h e Absolute any more than I want to be Hugo Miinsterberg. Nietzsche tells how the little girl asked, "Does the good God see everything?" "Yes," said her mother, "everything." "Well, I think that is highly improper." I do not think we are seeking to know everything. T h a t is not o u r ideal. O u r scientific ideal is not Tolstoy's "counting the n u m b e r of lady-bugs on the planet." Knowledge is properly and always selective, trying in science and philosophy to find the key-relations of the systems that exist, as compared with their possible alternatives. It is both wider and narrower than what exists. So also, the all-inclusive "eternal values" of Royce and Miinsterberg are not our values. I recall Royce saying suddenly one day that the great philosophical conflict was not between science and religion, b u t between morality and religion. It startled me, and yet at the time fitted into my criticism of Royce's Absolute as a sinister being, who built his triumph on our suffering and frustration. Both Royce and later Whitehead saw the difficulty, yet hardly met it successfully. H e who triumphs over frustration cannot fully appreciate the bitterness of frustration,

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while the individual who follows completely the road of surrender, Absolute Idealist or Vedantist, is turning away from the potentialities of his own highest personality. There are other lines on which our ideal picture of God might be developed, for instance Whitehead. Whitehead concedes the possible meaninglessness of the all-concepts, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-perfect. This is a queer world, and the oddness in it needs to be explained—a new argument from the contingency of the world. Perhaps God is an empiricist, learning by trial and error, for thought-experiments cannot determine in advance what potentialities may develop from an existent. Perhaps for God time is real. Perhaps God is democratic, allowing others their independence; perhaps a Quaker God, ruling by persuasion and not by force; perhaps he really is "a respecter of persons." He may be a God of adventure, choosing the unforeseeable. "But God can't be that way, Mr. Whitehead," you say. Why not? Who are you to be limiting God's power? Then there have been Boehme and Berdyaev, placing tragedy at the heart of things—and not merely the Cross only. Our ideal God may not be at all what we thought formerly; He may not be satisfied with those satisfactions. Returning to more mundane matters, today we face great questions, superindividual, social, international, of a valuation nature, but of immense complication. They are not to be decided by old rules of duty or by mere good intentions. They must be met by formulating a better social philosophy, with a wiser use of reason, by new social inventions, by imaginative construction and testing of parts of a design for a better social order. We could muddle through in building a coal-shed, but now we are building skyscrapers. Living becomes a high art and a dangerous one. Science gives us

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techniques, but who is to select the ends we should aim for? We can assemble facts, but who has the imagination to perceive on the one hand the systems of essential possibilities and the existential possibilities, and on the other the ranges of potential activities—not, I repeat, the passive potentialities of Aristotle—which constitute the reality of existent things? Philosophy is needed today, with a great urgency. Philosophers may at times seem to the outsider to be elaborating trifles. Sometimes they are. But the key to great problems may be in small distinctions made at vital points. T h e nuance this way or that may grow into vast differences as the consequences are developed: "dare to make that choice and I shall checkmate you in twelve moves." T h e doctor told Bob Burns's A u n t Sophie Ledbetter after her operation that she could now go u p and down stairs again. " T h a n k goodness," she said, "I sure am tired of shinnying u p a n d down that drainpipe every night." Philosophy does seem at times like shinnying u p and down drain spouts, and we all feel glad to be back on the broad stairs of ordinary life. But our world is no longer simple, our problems do not solve themselves, and there is still much for the philosopher to discover, out beyond where the smooth roads end. We are most confident we are thinking aright when we have not been alerted to the possible alternatives. A philosopher's job is to stop a n d think, and think twice. A philosopher should take the world, b u t not himself, seriously.

THE NATURALISM OF FREDERICK WOODBRIDGE It seems appropriate bridge Lectures Woodbridge

to reprint

this appreciation

by Professor

Costello

in the series of of Professor

from NATURALISM AND

THE HUMAN SPIRIT, edited

by Yervant

lumbia

1944)-

University

Press,

WoodFrederick

H. Krikorian

(Co-

W E ARE TOLD that in the nineteenth c e n t u r y n a t u r a l i s m was a n oversimplified doctrine w h i c h tried to e x p l a i n away the richness of experience. B u t today there is a n e w naturalism, w h i c h does justice to the f u l l variety of n a t u r a l p h e n o m e n a a n d h u m a n life. I am a sympathetic critic of any such p r o g r a m , a n d i n d e e d of any philosophy w h i c h does not, as d o skepticism a n d some forms of agnosticism, take pride in f a i l u r e . I d o not, indeed, like the new positivism, in so far as it is a "sour-grapes" philosophy, rationalizing

its o w n

inability

to t h i n k

things

t h r o u g h by d e n y i n g that unsolved problems exist. It seems to m e that we have come a l o n g way and k n o w a g r e a t d e a l — n o t too little, but too m u c h . W e h a v e so many pieces of the puzzle that w e c a n n o t p u t them all together. W e are m o r e aware than ever of the greatness of our o w n ignorance and m u s t a w a i t still f u r t h e r g a t h e r i n g of i n f o r m a t i o n . H e n c e any p h i l o s o p h i c a l theory that is not excessively reductionist is w e l c o m e to me. R e d u c t i o n i s m is always d u b i o u s , for as B i s h o p B u t l e r o n c e

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said, " A thing is what it is, and not some other thing," which unfortunately is far from a truism in philosophy. A n d it seems clear that the world is not merely "atoms and the v o i d . " Professor Royce used to tell a philosophical anecdote directed at all reductionists, from materialists to mystics. A small boy said to his elder brother, " W h a t is the sky?" T h e brother was a reductionist in the making and replied scornfully, " T h e r e ain't no sky." T h e little one stared again at the very visible great blue vault above and finally inquired timidly, "Yes, but what is it what ain't?" Yet at the same time we can hardly have a philosophy which leaves things entirely in their unanalyzed multiplicity. Philosophy must be partly reductionist. So even the new naturalism has at least one reductionist or liquidationist thesis: T h e r e is no "supernatural." G o d and immortality are myths. W i l l i a m J a m e s speaks of the feeling of relief which we experience when at last we give u p trying to be young or slender. We say, " T h a n k God, those illusions are gone." So the naturalist now looks lip to the great white throne, where once sat great J o v e himself, and exclaims, " T h a n k G o d , that illusion is gone." B u t great illusions are not so easy to banish. We must take care lest our suppressed illusions come back to plague us in altered guise, like grinning fiends from out the Freudian deep. I doubt if any of the men we are about to discuss would be properly characterized simply as an "atheist." I do not find any great unity, otherwise, among these new naturalists. Professor Dewey and Mr. Santayana are so f a r apart that no one can have profited by both and still be able fully to accept either. A n d both of them are more "idealistic," in the everyday sense of that word, than many a technically " i d e a l i s t " philosopher: Hegel, for instance, whom someone has called "not merely a realist but a brutalist," or Schopenhauer, author of that pleasant little sarcasm, "If you want comfort, g o to the priest. I can only tell you the truth."

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A n d Professor Woodbridge, about whom I wish to speak further, had a third, decidedly different, philosophy. I asked him once what he thought of Santayana's thesis that mind has n o causal place in the world. " W h e n Santayana says that," he replied, "he is ignoring obvious fact for the sake of theory. T h e existence of his own book, lying on the table there, is evidence to the contrary." O n another occasion I remember he said of Dewey, long his close friend and colleague: " I ask Dewey from time to time some simple question, such as, 'Is there not something about the past that never again changes?' Surely the state before change begins cannot itself also change." I said, " W h a t did he answer?" "Answer!" Woodbridge replied, "Dewey defined and distinguished and qualified, in such a maze of dialectic, that not only I did not get any answer, I didn't even know where my question went to. A n d do you know, when he gets that way, he thinks he is being empirical." Woodbridge's simple questions were themselves not always easy to understand. He called himself, with a bit of whimsical humor, a naive realist, but never was naivete more sophisticated. His questions were oracular and hinted always at a long train of previous personal thinking. I was always more interested in what he was implying or presupposing than in any answer I might have wit to make. So if the question seemed directed somewhere near me, I would respond, " B u t Professor Woodbridge, just what do you mean by that question?" He could hardly deny the legitimacy of such a response. For it was said of his own teacher, the legendary Garman, of Amherst, that Garman had his students so well trained in philosophical technique that were he to say, " Y o u n g men, do you believe in the lamp-post?" they would all come chorusing back, " B u t Professor, just what do you mean by the lamp-post?" Nevertheless, I do not think Woodbridge liked such a counter-question. He liked better the students who ventured a positive reply. T h e n Woodbridge would get a real stimulus, and after point-

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ing out the general ignorance, stupidity, and lack of fundamental training of present-day students, he would go into a brilliant and far-ranging exposition of the whole subject involved. H e did not mean to be so annihilating to the student w h o touched him off, for he was the kindliest of men, but he seemed to need some such stimulus to his thought. Woodbridge running a seminar used to recall to my mind a meeting which an Irish priest once told me about. T h e assembled Irishmen were delighted with the principal speaker, w h o told them of the new day close at hand when all Ireland would be one free country. W h e n the applause had subsided, the smiling little chairman arose, coughed, and looked around. " W o u l d innybody like to ask the shpaker a quistion?" A moment of silence, and then somebody in the back of the room inquired, " W h a t is to become of the north of Ireland in this new arrangement?" T h e startled audience looked around. Somebody exclaimed, " A n Orangeman," and the fracas was on. W h e n the police had restored order and the ambulance could be heard receding, the little chairman arose, coughed, and looked hopefully around. " W o u l d innybody ilse like to ask the shpaker a quistion?" A Woodbridge seminar was like that. A n d yet it always puzzled him that he could not turn on a general discussion as one might turn on the water at the tap. Woodbridge was a powerful personality. Those who knew him will not soon forget the square-cut face on the square shoulders, the forthright speech, the keenness, and the humor. Possibly he would have preferred to have us look at his work in the two great institutions for which he did so m u c h — a t his trusteeship of Amherst College and his deanship of Columbia University. Philosophers must be grateful for the Journal of Philosophy and for his long years as editor. If some of the early volumes suggested to Santayana the phrase, "the whited sepulchre," this is because no editor can print brilliant contributions which fail to arrive. A n d I think he helped to make

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a distinct improvement in the style and the liveliness of writing of philosophy in America. N o one can j u d g e whether Woodbridge might have accomplished more by writing more himself, rather than by activities as administrator and editor. Hegel, the thinker, went on correcting proof sheets while the windows rattled with the guns of J e n a . A n d today the m a n of action, Napoleon, is gone; but the E u r o p e of M a r x and L e n i n , of Mussolini and Hitler, was in Hegel's books. T h e s e things are hard to evaluate. N o r do I personally feel any too competent to criticize Woodbridge's somewhat fragmentary published works. I recall that somebody told me—perhaps it was Bertrand Russell—about a lecture on Bergson delivered by Bernard Shaw. In the midst of the lecture a little man near the front got more and more excited and began to gesticulate. Shaw paused, glanced down to see what was the source of the interruption, and said firmly: "Sit down and calm yourself, M . Bergson"; and then to the audience by way of apology, " I can always explain people's ideas better than they can do it themselves, and for some reason it always makes them angry." I make no such Shavian claim, and if I have any competence to speak of Woodbridge, it is that I was neither too close nor too f a r away to get some perspective on what he said and wrote. A n d I warn the reader that in what follows he will get merely my reactions to some aspects of Woodbridge's thought rather than a substitute for reading his books. Professor W o o d b r i d g e was as f o n d as a preacher of having a text to expound. His interesting Confessions (reprinted in his collected essays, Mature and Mind, 1937) call attention to some of the most typical. From Bishop Butler, through Arnold, he got: " T h i n g s are what they are, and their consequences will be what they will be; why then should we desire to be deceived?" From a characterization of Aristotle by Santayana came: "Everything ideal has a natural basis, and everything natural an ideal fulfillment." From J e v o n s : " W e can not suppose, and there is

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no reason to suppose, that by the constitution of the mind we are obliged to think of things differently from the manner in which they are." For Woodbridge these three texts in particular became centers for crystallizing his thinking, and indeed each text is in its way admirable. T h e y echo the forthrightness of the man and his freedom from ordinary illusions. In other texts and at times in some favorite metaphors, for instance, the often repeated comparisons based on the conception of "Light," as in his An Essay on Nature, I find him becoming to me obscure. T y p i c a l of words summing up a point of view is the word " N a t u r e " itself. T o Woodbridge, as to some of the other naturalistic philosophers, it carries a connotation of something very solid and real, an emotional unification of all things. T o w a r d Nature they feel a natural piety, as toward the great Mother of us all. For myself, I do not feel that piety, whether expressed by a Marcus Aurelius or a Woodbridge. T o me Nature seems rather a collective name for quite a mess of miscellaneous stuff. Nature should not, by some "pathetic fallacy," become a substitute for God. A n d if there are no gods, that is that. Let us not be "angry with them for not existing." But Woodbridge's feeling for Nature I can appreciate more than I do the attitude of those naturalist philosophers w h o take a spiritual pride in disillusionment: " W e are the enlightened ones, we know the worst, the world is infinitely cruel." T o Woodbridge the world was not thus alien to men, nor too solicitous either. It does not answer prayers, and we may be thankful that it does not answer other people's; but it does offer us material for building the better life. For Woodbridge the realm of Nature was a region in which man could feel very much at home, as himself a part of the drama, an actor, not a mere spectator. In this sense Woodbridge could hardly have agreed with Santayana. T o Santayana the life of the spirit, precious as it is to us, is a somewhat thin but delicious frosting or icing, spattered unevenly over some

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parts of the layer cake of essence a n d existence. Idealists try to live on icing a n d suffer from digestive disturbances a n d maln u t r i t i o n . So Santayana quotes Goethe that "it is in the superficial iridescence of things that o u r life is set" (im farbigen Abglanz haben wir das Leben). W e should not, like the rustic at the play, foolishly forget the spectator's role. N o t so Woodbridge, to whom man's life and N a t u r e were all of a piece. O n e thinks rather of Spinoza. Yet I take it t h a t the o p e n i n g a n d the close of Spinoza's Ethics were not q u i t e acceptable to W o o d b r i d g e . T h e emphasis on the infinity of the system of things, the awe a n d the acquiescence, the u t t e r infinite greatness of N a t u r e and the contrasted littleness of m a n , combined with the complete lack of arbitrariness (everything having a n e x p l a n a t i o n , both what exists a n d w h a t does not, in the necessity of the one great inevitable system)—all this was too extreme to fit in with observable facts. W o o d b r i d g e liked Spinoza's emphasis on structure in things, which ties them together in p e r m a n e n t stability. As he once remarked to me, " W e can be arbitrary, as in c o u n t i n g by tens, but if we c o u n t by tens, casting out the nines is fixed for us by the n a t u r e of n u m b e r . " A system as tight, however, as Spinoza's, as u n b r e a k a b l e , which in the last analysis we can only acquiesce in, seemed to Woodbridge a fantastic extension of a true principle: of that structural linkage which gives skeleton and backbone to the world of Nature. Man's life is not contrasted with Nature, b u t neither is it submerged in the whole. In his own presentation, the character of "the world of L i g h t " seemed to him to reveal most nearly the essence of the n a t u r a l world. He appears to mean q u i t e literally, not the physicist's waves of radiation, b u t light as we experience the quality of it, its brightness and its colors. H e was, of course, very well aware of the arguments which would make out that the physical world is "dark and cold and shaking like a jelly." H e knew the arguments based on well-known facts: our world of color

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is correlated with only one octave in the vast series of radiations; the color black corresponds to n o radiations at all; a n d so forth. But he t h o u g h t these arguments overdone, the conclusions unjustified. H e seems more the monist in epistemology, the "new realist," than even the famous six, the "six little realists" whom Professor Royce described as trying to sit on the monistic fence and falling off one by one into some heresy or other. For Woodbridge, as I understand him, we actually see the Dog Star out yonder, not smaller than it is, b u t at a distance, a n d not merely at a distance in space, b u t at a distance in time, eight years back. W e see into the past. T o deny this is not merely to deny that we see something that is in the past, but to deny that we ever see anything at a distance in space, the arguments being parallel. T h e contentions of the dualists, it seems to me, against Woodbridge's theory of perception, are very strong. B u t the arguments against the dualistic theory are also very strong. W e are told that the physicists hold the wave theory of light on Monday, Wednesday, a n d Friday, a n d the particle theory the rest of the week. So are we situated with regard to monist a n d dualist theories of perception. N e i t h e r seems tenable against the arguments of the other. Yet there must be an e x p l a n a t i o n which fuller knowledge will reveal. I can, perhaps, illustrate Woodbridge's position, t h r o u g h contrast, by repeating his description of a lecture by B e r t r a n d Russell given at C o l u m b i a just before the First W o r l d W a r . I cannot, of course, r e m e m b e r verbatim, b u t it ran something like this. W o o d b r i d g e said: "Russell lectured to us a b o u t w h a t we perceive when we perceive a penny. H e pulled a penny o u t of his pocket and held it u p for us to see. W e gazed at it hypnotically. H e turned it over a n d whirled it a r o u n d . W e followed his every move. H e explained that the p e n n y was really a series of little elliptical flat disks, each two-dimensional, which ran o u t toward us like b u t t o n s on a wire. In fact, there were rows of disks r u n n i n g o u t in all directions. T h e collection

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of these was the penny. H e told us the penny we saw was m u c h smaller t h a n the penny he saw. I confess it did n o t look smaller to m e t h a n pennies usually are. But suddenly things grew worse. W e were in six-dimensional space. Each of us, he told us, knew three dimensions of this space, a n d in it was a twod i m e n s i o n a l flat disk. T h i s was our 'hard d a t u m , ' o u r penny. O t h e r people had three-dimensional spaces, too, in the sixdimensional space, and each of them had a little brown disk, his own precious 'hard d a t u m , ' which was his private penny. A n d we h a d somehow to get together a n d correlate these disklike pennies. T h e collection of all of them was the only reallyreal penny. T h o u g h just how we were to correlate so many things we did not possess, he did not explain. Instead of that, he gave the penny a final twirl in the air a n d p u t it in his pocket, at which we all gasped. For just what it was he was p u t t i n g in his pocket had by this time become an ineffable mystery." I think YVoodbridge here p u t his finger on what is a f u n d a m e n t a l difficulty of any monadistic dualist theory of m i n d , the difficulty of giving any operational definition of correlation. I recall that Russell said on one occasion that Leibniz should have been surprised to discover that "the end of his nose was a colony of spiritual beings." B u t surely it is just as startling to discover that the end of one's nose is a sixd i m e n s i o n a l manifold of Russell perspectives. May I t u r n aside from Woodbridge to remark that the difficulty a b o u t correlation becomes more insistent to me when I try to make out what is meant by some of o u r physicists as they write a b o u t relativity. I am writing here of something that puzzled Woodbridge, rather than something a b o u t which he h a d reached settled conclusions. T h e symbols used in relativity physics lead to results which u n q u e s t i o n a b l y are verified by observation. But when a n u m b e r of the physicists start to i n t e r p r e t their symbols, not merely popularly b u t also in their serious works, I get startling impressions that they d o not al-

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ways know what their own symbols mean. I think one may have symbols, one may even have verifications, and still not know how to interpret the total theory—or one may smuggle in uncriticized, as if self-evident, a very ambiguous or dubious interpretation. Woodbridge remarks that the way to understand symbols clearly is to translate them. I have a conviction that symbols which are understood can always be translated into other symbols. It does not follow that if you translate mathematical symbols into, let us say, English words, you can develop their implications in the new form (words) by deduction as exactly as in the mathematical-symbol form. F a r from it. A n d it may be very hard even to say what you want to say. B u t if you do say it, you may be able to see more clearly what the results mean—not because English is the language G o d uses, but because any translation sets one free from the special symbols used, or does so in part. B u t now let me illustrate further how this matter of correlation implies some basis of identity, reminding the reader that I am criticizing only certain vagaries, not the entire theory of relativity. May I begin with an amusing illustration of a trivial sort. I asked a group of students: "If you could suddenly j u m p from New York to Chicago, you would arrive an hour earlier than you started: leaving New York at 9 o'clock, you would find yourself in Chicago at 8. If you continued traveling in the same direction, could you not get back to New York on the preceding day?" T o this one student solemnly replied, with the apparent f u l l concurrence of the others, that you could do this, except that the nations had established an international date line to prevent it. I could not help being a bit sarcastic at the time about this amazing feat of international co-operation, which kept people from wandering off into yesterday or tomorrow. B u t I found it surprisingly hard to make these young men see that it was not " r e a l l y " an hour earlier in Chicago, but the same identical time, which was called 9 in New

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Y o r k and 8 in Chicago, and that you do not grow younger by moving west. T h e n I picked u p a paper by a young scientific positivist, who said, " L e n g t h is number, and of course if the n u m b e r changes, the length changes." Science knows only " p o i n t e r readings," I suppose! I had always taken for granted that it was the same length which was one and three and thirtysix, in yards, feet, and inches, the same identical length. T h e new theory of addition of velocities was named the "theory of relativity." H a v i n g used the word "relativity," physicists and philosophers seem to have been thereby inhibited from thinking that space could be in any sense absolute. T h e y forgot that Leibniz, the most famous historical defender of the relativity of space, was led to conclude that space is a confused illusion of the m i n d . B u t just what a completely relative space would be, that is not a confusion but an objective fact, is even more puzzling than the completely absolute space of which Newton apparently speaks. I do not wish to examine here the general question, but rather I w o u l d consider some illustrative cases. W e are told that a length is shortened when in motion in its own direction, so nothing has an absolute length. B u t let us note that length is a correlation between one length and another—or to avoid the double meaning, let us say that length is a ratio between one extensity and another; and this ratio may have various values, depending upon the relative motion of the extensities and the operations used in comparing them. It is the same extensity which has two lengths, just as it is the same time which is 9 o'clock in New York and 8 o'clock in Chicago. It is the same man w h o looks smaller when one block distant than when close at my side, and likewise I look smaller to him. By "looks smaller" one means subtends a smaller angle at the observer, though in another sense, as Professor Woodbridge always insisted, he " l o o k s " no smaller than usual, but just farther away. Of course, in terms of subtended angle there is no one angle which is his " r e a l " size. T h e

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relativity case is very closely analogous. T h a t it should extend to time ratios and mass ratios is indeed a bit surprising, especially since "mass" was originally an artifact to secure absolute permanence, as against the relativity of weight. T h e case of time is particularly striking. W e are told that a moving clock "really" runs slower than a stationary one. T h e interpretation that some give to this does, as Woodbridge says, "seriously raise the question whether the authors are clear in their own minds." Paul flies away and comes back, still young, and Peter has grown old waiting for him. But then it is all purely relative, and Peter may equally well be considered to have been the "little pig that went to market," so he is young and Paul is old. T h e theory ends in utter contradiction. T w o clocks simply cannot both gain on one another and add u p their gains until each is ahead when recompared. Instead of admitting the contradiction and trying a better interpretation, the relativity writers appeal to the general theory of relativity. "Maybe I can't lick you, but I got a big brother what can!" According to the general theory, if two clocks are found to differ after reunion, the fact can be explained by unsymmetrical forces. Certainly it can, and we do not need the general theory to do it. W e might suppose one clock had been hit by a hammer. But the question is, why should they, or how can they, differ in a symmetrical case? It is a perfect ignoratio elenchi. If it be said that no symmetrical case is possible, then that statement needs proof, for there do seem to be such cases. For example, let us consider an imaginary case like this. Suppose the earth hollowed out and evacuated of air and wells sunk from the north and south poles to the central cavity. Let us further suppose a projectile dropped from the north pole. It would speed up, then sweep across the central cavity with constant velocity, then slow d o w n as it rose to the south pole level; and then it would fall back to the north pole again in the same way. Let us suppose another projectile from the south

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pole, the two projectiles provided with synchronized clocks a n d observers in the usual relativist way. T h e r e is n o insuperable difficulty a b o u t the a p p r o x i m a t e synchronizing of the start, a n d precautions taken to avoid head-on collision at the center. A n d supposing the experiment tried, there is n o reason whatever why the clocks should not read the same when they pass, a n d w h e n they repass again, for the whole situation is completely symmetrical. B u t for an observer on each projectile, the other clock would also seem to be r u n n i n g slow at the time they pass. T h i s seeming is an observed fact, also, not an unreality. But it is n o t on a par with the cases, u n d e r the general theory, when there is a real asymmetry, as when one clock is in a heavy gravitational field and the other not. W e r e t u r n , therefore, to this conclusion, that there is n o t h i n g in the special theory of relativity leading to a plurality of spaces a n d times which have to be mysteriously correlated with one a n o t h e r a n d therefore to a denial of the unity of nature. T h e r e is n o t h i n g necessarily leading to a pluralistic theory of monads or separate perspectives, like Carr's monadology or Russell's six dimensions. T h e different observers are observing the same world. O n the other h a n d , the conclusions drawn by some hasty generalizers f r o m the general theory of relativity, namely, the e x t r e m e unification which would eliminate any difference between space a n d time, also seems hardly justified by the formulas. T u r n i n g a yardstick into a clock by flipping it a r o u n d into the f o u r t h dimension has not yet been done. Again, some of the illustrations used by serious writers on the general theory "raise a question w h e t h e r they are clear in their own minds." I read that there is n o absolute rotation, although a clock on the rim of a t u r n t a b l e would r u n slower than one at the center. " F o r if the turn-table stood still and the rest of the universe rotated in the opposite direction, the result would, by the general theory, be the same." Surely not! Even the nearest "fixed" star would have to move faster than light, and a traveler

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on it would, in the terms of the well-known little poem, " g o out one day in a relative way, and come back the previous night." By the theory itself complete relativity is impossible here. T h e r e does, then, seem to be something absolute about any rotation, with its set of related phenomena. A physicist of sufficient skill on the planet Venus might determine that his planet was rotating from observing these related phenomena. W e may presume that he would have the aid of other whirling things to observe, such as tops or tornadoes. But operationally this would involve no reference to an absolute space, as Newton supposed, for there are no bench marks on empty space with reference to which rotation can be observed. So the absoluteness of space is not essential to the observed phenomena. But also there would be, for such an observer, w h o is operationally determining if his planet is rotating, no reference to the "fixed" stars, which are in fact perpetually hidden from the surface of Venus by a canopy of cloud. Both sides of the usual controversy here are alike mistaken. Operationally the stars are irrelevant, and so is absolute space, so rotation is not with reference to either. Incidentally, this last illustration brings out what seems to me a proper use of operational definition. O n the other hand, the example used by Bridgman, which W o o d b r i d g e speaks of as "impressive," namely, that distance from top to bottom of a sheet of paper is a different sort of thing from the distance from here to the sun, because operationally differently arrived at, seems to me merely muddled. T h e fundamental difference between the length of a page and the distance to the sun is that one is longer than the other, but they are quite comparable. T h e Eskimos are said to have a different name for a seal on the ice and a seal in the water, because the h u n t i n g operations called for are different. A more civilized language would note that it was the same seal in two different locations. If there are fifteen different operations by which the size of an

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atom can be measured, the scientist does not conclude that there are atoms of fifteen different sorts, but that the same size of the same atom is confirmed in fifteen different ways. R e t u r n i n g again to the generalized theory of relativity, I find this sort of argument used. " R e l a t i v i t y has proved," it is repeatedly said, " t h a t space-time is a four-dimensional manifold, and it is n o longer proper even to speak of space apart from time. T h e r e is no space-at-a-particular-moment, since there is more than one set of events simultaneous with any given event." T h i s seems to me a curious bull—not even an Irish bull, for it is not pregnant. It is just confusion. A spaceat-a-time is not the old notion, it is the four-dimensional notion. If space were independent of time, it would be the same space at all times and might be linked to a particular time by various simultaneity relations. B u t in four-dimensional space-time, space-at-a-time becomes a necessary notion. T h e space of today is not the same as the space of tomorrow. Various simultaneities to one point-event involve various cross-sections of space-time at that point-event. A n analogue would be to have more than one perpendicular to a line at a point in plane geometry. T h e s e complexities may be resolvable, but before drawing metaphysical conclusions you had better make sure of your foundations. Another point where we should do well not to draw hasty metaphysical conclusions is in the relativity treatment of the finite velocity of light as if it were infinite. T h e light comes to us from the A n d r o m e d a nebula in some 1,500,000 or more years, yet, by the relativity theory the causal interval is zero and there is no time lag between the event and the perceiving of it. I have spent time on such considerations here, because some one might pronounce Woodbridge's views about the unity of nature or the evident difference between space and time to be quite obsolete in the new space-time physics of today. T h e r e are surprising things in this new physics: the equation between matter and energy, the possibility of verifying a non-

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Euclidean geometry, and the like. But the situation is not completely revolutionized, and a good deal which we are told is new scientific fact may turn out to be actually metaphysical speculation or even confusion. So Woodbridge used to shake his head and remark: "Some of these novelties I have known for years. Others seem really new. But I am puzzled, for these relativists keep making statements which can hardly mean what they seem to say." With that let us return to VVoodbridge's discussion in what is perhaps his most striking book, The Realm of Mind (1926). It gives an effect of originality, even when the reader has noted that Woodbridge is close to Spinoza. For it is not the ordinary popular Spinoza. I once saw a marginal note by Charles Peirce concerning Jowett's translation of Plato. Peirce remarked that if Jowett had always written down exactly what he made out of Plato's text, he would from time to time relapse into complete nonsense. But when Jowett came to a place where he could not grasp what Plato was talking about, he put in some pleasant material of his own and cheerfully went on. T h e result was very satisfactory to everybody, except to the readers of Greek who could also think—not a large group. It is much the same with the understanding of Spinoza, and that is why Woodbridge can restate Spinoza in new words and make it seem at first to be something novel and startling, whether he speaks of the nature of mind or the character of the good life. In print and in conversation Woodbridge was ever praising the greatness of Aristotle, and he acknowledged indebtedness to Plato, to Locke, to Santayana, to Bacon and Hobbes. But I do not find in his published writings echoes of the very substance of these authors, as I do of Spinoza. It is with a difference, indeed, for the infinite and the absolute, which is so central in Spinoza, appealed little to Woodbridge, and in those parts which he does borrow he is not simply repeating formulas but also rethinking their meaning. Without dwelling too much upon summary or parallels, we

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may note certain features of Woodbridge's characterization of mind. H e begins by saying that the body thinks, just as the body walks; there is no such thing as a mind, but only forms of behavior. W o o d b r i d g e himself qualifies, even reverses, these statements later. B u t such statements are so typical of some types of naturalistic philosophy that we may pause to raise certain questions. If m i n d is behavior, it is behavior directed toward things remote, in the past, perhaps imaginary, perhaps abstract. T h e behavior of walking, on the contrary, involves only a co-ordination of muscles and bones in the here and now — a clearly bodily performance. T h e behavior of thinking probably is always linked with some activity of the brain, currents r u n n i n g along pathways, very complicated without a doubt, but monotonously the same sort of thing, whether we dream, or remember our childhood, or think out a logical problem. Physiological psychology, in so f a r as it concerns brain processes, is 90 percent introspection and 10 percent mildly plausible conjecture about the neural accompaniments. T o say it is the brain or " t h e o r g a n i s m " that thinks, is to deceive ourselves with an e x p l a n a t i o n that w o u l d indeed be so simple, if only it were true, that we have a strong wish to believe it and to disregard the complexity of fact. Professor W o o d b r i d g e further suggests that the individuality of the " i n n e r l i f e " of each of us is essentially d u e to the fact that we have different bodies. T h a t each has such an inner life is made evident, for e x a m p l e , in Professor Royce's philosophical anecdote about the old colonel. T h e colonel had imbibed a little too much and was endeavoring to preserve a pose of great gravity in m i x e d company. Suddenly a rat ran across the floor and stopped directly in front of him. H e looked furtively around. A l l eyes were in his direction. H e concentrated on the rat. T h e r e it was, still there. Suddenly he blurted out, " Y o u people think I see a rat, but I don't." If o u r thoughts were public property, there w o u l d be no point to the story. W e must,

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of course, grant that individual minds are associated with individual bodies. You do see things from a different place than I; your headache I cannot feel. W e laugh at the Irishman w h o took a strictly objective point of view about a noise in his head and insisted that he could hear it fifty feet away. So Spinoza said that every man thinks of things confusedly, not as they are, but as they affect his body. Yet I am not altogether convinced that the separateness of minds has its sole basis in the separateness of bodies. W h e n Kant so repeatedly insists, in the famous transcendental deduction, that there is no experience unless it be synthesized under the unity of apperception, which unites always a span of time, he seems to me to be indicating something in the make-up and structure of all thinking which is not reducible to the unity of the bodily organism or the brain. I doubt if the brain ever does act as a unit or, supposing it does, whether this is necessarily relevant to the unity of experience. T o me there is here a question of observable facts, and the facts do not simplify into the body as thinker. T h i s oversimplification is indeed part of the humor in a favorite Woodbridge quotation preserved for us by Professor Randall: " M a n is nothing but a tube. W i t h the one end thereof he befouleth the ground; with the other he praiseth G o d . " Let us turn now to another character of thinking on which Woodbridge and, indeed, Spinoza insist. W h e n someone raised the question one day whether there is ever such a thing as imageless thought, W o o d b r i d g e replied that the real question is whether there is any thought which is not imageless. T h i s recalled to me a remark once made in my presence by Dr. Elmer Southard, w h o combined an expert knowledge of neurology and psychology with an extraordinary skill at playing chess. Southard spoke of playing simultaneous games blindfolded and playing also in three dimensions, without a board, and he said that though on such occasions he knew exactly where the pieces were on the boards, he never had any imagery at all, no

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mnemonic word, no picture of the boards, except occasionally perhaps a single chessman and a hand reaching for it. T h i s was the opinion of a highly trained psychological observer. Psychologists talk of linguistic cues, of muscular tensions in the throat, and the like, and maybe there are such. I agree with Dr. Southard in not always finding such by introspection. T h e y are certainly not what I know, for that is before me. Even when I think in words, I do not feel that I confuse the words with the thought. Again, there may be local signs of a qualitative sort when the skin is touched in different places, but I find I take note quite directly of the places, not of the qualitative signs, and these places are, so far as I can tell, in the space world, the world of physical nature. I remember a psychologist w h o was nicknamed years ago "the man whose consciousness is at the end of a stick." I appreciate his insight in the matter. T h e most obvious thing which is before the mind when we know something is the thing known, and as it is known. By the aid of whatever imagery we know it, what we know must itself somehow be before us. T h i s is at once an obvious truism and a startling paradox. W h e n I sit here in this house and think of the moon, it is the moon I think of; and if, as may be, I have a mental image, a picture of the moon, I quite clearly distinguish it from the moon itself. Of course I do not think of the moon as here, crowded between these four walls, like the mountain coming to Mahomet. But it is the moon I know, where it is, yonder in space, and not some tightening of the throat or echo of a sound. A n d yet I recognize that there is something more involved in this knowledge than just the moon. For there is the possibility of error. Yet even error demands a basis of contact: to be in error about this object, I must gTasp this object in part in order that I may be mistaken about the rest of it. It is precisely this object that I am mistaken about. If truth be of descriptions, we must be able to check our descriptions; if it be correspondence, we must be able to compare the

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corresponding factors; if it be coherence, we seem to need more known coherence between specific facts or specific beliefs than we have; if it be success in action, we must be able to see why we succeed. T h e idealist thinks he has the solution. I cannot agree. T h e r e are three factors which must be taken into account in any theory of knowledge. T h e r e is error; there is ignorance; there are individual knowers, who know at a certain time in a world which was a going concern long before they were born. W h e n an idealist thinks his own premisses through, he ends, so far as I can see, in a denial of all three. He denies them in favor of one errorless knower who knows all in one timeless act. I agree with Woodbridge that the result is rather fantastic; one has proved too much, and the starting point has disappeared in the conclusion. As for pluralistic idealists, I doubt if they can prove their idealism without upsetting their pluralism. I do not wish to deny finally these hypotheses—the world may turn out to be a fantastic place. T h e r e is in objective idealism, however, an emphasis on something which Woodbridge has tried to specify in his notion of "objective mind." Woodbridge expresses the hope that this is not too much like what Immanuel Kant was driving at, for he does not like Kant. I suppose he means what Kant called "possible experience," or what Woodbridge may have recollected, from student days, of Neo-Kantian readings of Kant. I would on another occasion, perhaps, say a word in defense of Kant and Leibniz, both of whom, particularly Leibniz, Woodbridge heartily disliked. But I do find myself denying that even Kant is justified in using language which suggests that "knowledge in general" or "experience in general" has some meaning, except as a pure abstraction, if it is taken apart from individual knowers. Kant's unity of apperception seems to me an essential element in my experience or in anyone's experience, but there are as many such unities as there are centers of

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e x p e r i e n c e . T h e K a n t i a n categories seem to me a fusion, or c o n f u s i o n , of t w o separable things, the ways in w h i c h the m i n d f u n c t i o n s , w h i c h ways are t h i n k i n g , a n d the u l t i m a t e characters of things t h o u g h t of. T h e r e is n o necessity that I can see in the ways in w h i c h the m i n d functions, e x c e p t as forced by the t r u t h c o n c e r n i n g the things it thinks a b o u t . W h e r e the o b j e c t i v e categories come in is s o m e t h i n g w h i c h I shall indicate later. B u t let us a p p r o a c h the question f r o m the angle of W o o d b r i d g e a n d Spinoza. W o o d b r i d g e ' s " o b j e c t i v e m i n d " is the r e a l m of truths a n d their implications. It is n o t so very different f r o m Spinoza's " a t t r i b u t e of m i n d , " w h i c h is all things taken f r o m a certain angle. " T h e order and c o n n e c t i o n of ideas is i d e n t i c a l w i t h the order and c o n n e c t i o n of things," W o o d b r i d g e repeats after Spinoza, and still r e p e a t i n g Spinoza he adds that " i d e a s " are q u i t e different f r o m mental images or psychic stuff. T h i s is e m p h a t i c a l l y not panpsychism. Ideas are w h a t the intellect knows, a c c o r d i n g to Spinoza, but the intellect always k n o w s truly, k n o w i n g all things directly as they are a n d w i t h o u t error. A t this p o i n t I enter a caveat: I d o not believe w e ever are free f r o m the possibility of error, n o r am I sure W o o d b r i d g e w o u l d h o l d w i t h Spinoza at this p o i n t . B u t I take it that for W o o d b r i d g e the world as an o b j e c t of k n o w l edge is the same w o r l d as the realm of N a t u r e , except that we here stress certain other relationships, those of m e a n i n g and i m p l i c a t i o n , of possibility and negativity, instead of succession a n d cause. Structure belongs in parallel to both realms. W i t h o u t b e i n g too sure just w h e r e I begin to insert my o w n t h o u g h t s in place of those of W o o d b r i d g e , I look u p o n this r e a l m of " o b j e c t i v e m i n d " s o m e w h a t as follows. W o o d b r i d g e ' s w o r d " s t r u c t u r e " seems to me a little a m b i g u o u s , b u t to indicate a very real characteristic in all concrete things. Structure is w h a t is i n v a r i a n t in a process o c c u r r i n g in time, like a water p i p e that guides the flow of water or the nodes in a

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vibrating string. W h e n structures and processes are sufficiently unified to take on a career of their own, rather independent of surroundings, we may use some additional word, perhaps speak of an "organization." Proceeding backward in the direction of higher abstraction and generality, we may speak of a mathematical structure, or perhaps we use the word "system." A system seems more like a group of relations which belong together or are relevant to one another. A t a still higher stage of abstraction, we may consider only the objects or things which are connected by relations, abstracting even from the quality of the relations, and then we are reduced to considering " o r d e r " or arrangement. I was first introduced to the study of order by Professor J o s i a h Royce, back in the days before the new revelation by Wittgenstein and the Vienna school. R o y c e was interested in the new symbolic logic, having been made aware of it by Charles Peirce, who told him, " R o y c e , you should study logic, you need it so much." For R o y c e this new logic used symbols, but was not about symbols particularly. He strongly protested the effort to give precedence to the calculus of propositions, over those of classes and relations. T h e general logic of order was used and applied by the thinker in his syllogisms, but the logic of thinking was applied logic. We could illustrate the same ordinal structures in diagrams or could cut out models of them f r o m paper. T h e science of order was also the general science, of which the mathematical sciences were specialized developments. Order was fundamental. T h e truths of geometry could lie about lines and points, but it was their ordinal relations that counted, and quantities were only important in science because they could be ordered. Royce liked to play with another illustration of geometry, angels that sang in heavenly choirs: for any two angels, there was one and only one choir in which they both sang; any two choirs, only one angel that sang in both. T h e r e was no space in this geometry of angels,

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and the first book of Euclid suffered a queer sea change, but it was just as good a geometry, being the same system of order. Of course, in this general logic of order there is a very high degree of abstraction, as in symbolic logic generally. A "relation" is not what you might think, but only the set of ordered pairs of terms which ordinarily would be considered to be related by the relation. Even true and false become T and F, and the one just as good as the other, often entirely symmetrical. It remained for those after Royce to discuss chiefly order among symbols, where whole complex propositions turned into p and q, and the relations among the truth-values of these, the aforementioned T and F, became the only relations in the world, all else being just atoms of being. Once you go as far as this, such a term as "relevance" has practically no meaning, from the point of view of such a "logical atomism." Efforts to introduce relevance, as by Professor C. I. Lewis, have not been too successful. T h e trouble surely has been that there has come about a confusion of a general science of order, which is prior to symbols, with a science of symbols. Royce used to say that ordinal logic and chemistry both had to use symbols, but were not about symbols. Logic as thus considered is also not about thought, as was the older logic, but the old meaning adds to the popular confusion. T h i s confusion of a logic of order and one of symbols has created a new positivist metaphysics, a highly anemic metaphysics, even perniciously so—"logical atomism." It has been contended by Professor J o h n Dewey and others that the subject matter of the exact sciences, such as mathematics and formal logic, is of human invention, as are the symbols used. We define as we arbitrarily choose. We make these things. I would not wish to deny a parallelism to invention in the way we arrive at these objects and construct symbols for them. But the arbitrariness can be exaggerated. We define a circle, yet the truths about the circle aie endless and to find

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them involves long and arduous inquiry. T h e value of jr is not arbitrary, nor can it be made exactly e q u a l to 3, not even by the inspired text of H o l y W r i t or the authoritative will of the sovereign legislature of the state of Indiana. T h e search f o r precision and rigor of proof is a genuine search, and the pragmatic value of these sciences, in their applications, is due largely to the fact that they reveal systematic connections not made by h u m a n fiat. T h e r e may be many "logics," considered as systems of algebra. We know there are many geometries. B u t this sort of arbitrariness is superficial. As W i l l a r d G i b b s once remarked, a mathematician can assume anything he pleases to start f r o m — u n l i k e the physicist, who "has to be sane part of the time." B u t the reason for such freedom is the great n u m b e r of possible systems, not any looseness within a system. Since a symbolic system consists often of a few symbols repeated over and over, at times one is likely to think of it as pretty much a tautology. B u t the system is not the " s y m b o l s " that we see, those marks on paper. W h a t is symbolic is the way we are putting them together in more and more complex syntheses. Demonstrations then reveal a certain linkage of identity a m i d the constructions. One is struck by the fertility resulting f r o m the introduction of a single new concept. T h u s , f o r instance, f r o m projective geometry, by the introduction of a single unit of length, all of metrical geometry can be developed: the unit being projectively duplicated wherever needed. One discovers also that the language of "exact science" may be curiously inexact and misleading: constants are what may be arbitrarily changed, but variables are not arbitrary, being what is really constant in a system. When we try to get back to the foundations of mathematics and the logic of order, to what Professor R o y c e considered the new search for the "categories," the inquiry becomes more and more involved in difficulties which are due to the natural

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i n a d e q u a c y of symbols. I recall seeing a letter w r i t t e n late in life by Charles Peirce, a master of the history of logic. Peirce e x p l o d e d because his correspondent had w r i t t e n , " T h i n g s e q u a l to the same t h i n g are e q u a l to each other, a n d therefore . . ." Peirce said very sharply that it was the h e i g h t of logical stupidity to try to turn a p r i n c i p l e of inference i n t o a premise a n d state it. A u g u s t u s D e M o r g a n used to be similarly emphatic. S u c h foolishness is like that of the curate in the Bab Ballads, w h o tried to prove by the rules of B i s h o p W h a t e l y that " w h a t is true of all is true of each one separately," that is, by syllogisms that the p r i n c i p l e of the syllogism is sound. T h e s e things cann o t be proved, or even stated, in the o r d i n a r y way. If one were a b l e to state in a true p r o p o s i t i o n the l a w of c o n t r a d i c t i o n , this p r o p o s i t i o n w o u l d n o r m a l l y h a v e a contradictory, w h i c h w o u l d b e the contradictory of the law of c o n t r a d i c t i o n . T h e theory of types is merely one case of this general characteristic of logical forms, as in the e x a m p l e in w h i c h y o u c a n n o t m e a n i n g f u l l y say a class is a m e m b e r of itself, or e q u a l l y that it is not a memb e r of itself. L o g i c a l principles c a n n o t be directly discussed. I r e m e m b e r that B e r t r a n d Russell once described the science of logic as " a science of ghosts, w h i c h deals w i t h u n m e n t i o n a b l e things." W h a t w e find it practicable to d o is usually to m a k e a statement a b o u t symbols, such as, that it is meaningless to use symbols except in certain ways. Y o u lay d o w n a rule, instead of stating a true proposition, and it looks like an arbitrary fiat. B u t it is not arbitrary. C o n t r a d i c t o r y symbols for propositions can b o t h find a place on the same sheet of paper, considered as marks on paper. N e i t h e r rises u p to abolish the other. It is in the realm of w h a t is symbolized that c o n t r a d i c t i o n and i n c o m p a t i b i l i t y and impossibility are f o u n d . Y o u choose to use symbols this way? Yes, indeed, b u t y o u are like M a r g a r e t F u l l e r w h e n she accepted the u n i v e r s e — " G a d , she'd b e t t e r . " T h e r e is a realm that symbols mean. T h i s is the realm that Professor W o o d b r i d g e called " o b j e c t i v e m i n d . " H e was himself

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not much interested in such matters as symbolic l o g i c — a n d its local representatives around Columbia University. H e was not so much interested in technical analysis as in direct seeing. T h e world in which our symbols enable us to communicate with one another is our human world. It spreads out into the whole daily world in which we live. It was at this that Woodbridge was looking. Woodbridge was an immediate empiricist, like the great philosophers whom he admired so much, Locke and Aristotle. I know it is a popular opinion that Aristotle was a speculative philosopher who misled the human race for two thousand years with wild theorizing, until modern empirical science came along to bring us back into contact with the facts. But if we inquire how Aristotle came to fall into those errors for which he has been most blamed, we shall find that he got them by direct observation, or certainly he thought that he got them in that way. T h a t was why he felt so sure. How did he know that the heavenly bodies move in circles around the earth? Did he not see them swing nightly in circles round the pole? Or that heavy bodies fall faster than light ones? Like the critic of Galileo w h o let weights fall from the leaning tower at Pisa (a more authentic occurrence than the popular reversed version), Aristotle doubtless saw how bodies fall. H o w did he know that moving bodies on earth tend to a state of rest? He saw it happen. In all this Aristotle was the empiricist. Modern science began with thought, not with observation, in Galileo, Descartes, Newton. T h e mistake of a Descartes in trying to spin the theory of the universe out of his own head was not that he used thought, but that he overlooked the great variety of possible alternatives and the weakness of the human mind in imagining what these alternatives are. These are the factors that make an empirical check on thinking imperative. Only by constant contact with facts observed can we find strength to mold and reshape our hypotheses. T h e r e is a value in such a general picture of the natural

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w o r l d as W o o d b r i d g e tried to k e e p before h i m . It saves o n e f r o m s p e c u l a t i v e extravagances and one-sided loss of c o n t a c t w i t h the everyday world. B u t such a picture is itself l o a d e d w i t h u n r e c o g n i z e d t h o u g h t elements. Y o u see w i t h the m i n d , n o t w i t h the eye, even w h e n you seem to yourself to be directly l o o k i n g at the w o r l d a r o u n d you. Y o u m i g h t , indeed, b e in g r e a t e r e r r o r if y o u trusted the eye instead of the m i n d , b u t possible error lurks in both. Y o u r vision can b e profitably dev e l o p e d a n d criticized only by w h a t seems to m e a h i g h e r d e g r e e of d e t a i l e d technical e x a m i n a t i o n of f u n d a m e n t a l s than I find in W o o d b r i d g e ' s s o m e w h a t impressionist picture. N o m a n can be sure he has before h i m all the relevant considerations in any p h i l o s o p h i c a l p r o b l e m . So the p h i l o s o p h e r needs vision, b u t he also needs endless self-criticism a n d endless alertness for the little discrepancy w h i c h indicates that he is not q u i t e on the r i g h t trail. I w o u l d close this discussion of W o o d b r i d g e ' s r e a l m of obj e c t i v e m i n d w i t h a w o r d of praise for his r e h a b i l i t a t i o n of o b j e c t i v e teleology. Since D a r w i n we have all been a f r a i d to talk in teleological terms. W e fear we shall be accused of appeali n g to some D i v i n e p l a n and purpose. Y e t n a t u r a l p r o d u c t s certainly d o possess those characteristics w h i c h i n v i t e us to use the l a n g u a g e of means a n d ends, s o m e w h a t as if it were all designed. T h e old lady w h o saw the little k a n g a r o o look o u t of the b i g k a n g a r o o ' s pocket said q u i t e n a t u r a l l y , " G o o d heavens, w h a t w i l l they think of next-'" Yet the k a n g a r o o ' s p o u c h is truly a case of a means to an end, just as f a l l i n g rain is a necessary m e a n s to the end of m a k i n g the crops g r o w or the valleys w i d e n . W o o d b r i d g e insists we have a right to this lang u a g e of m e a n s and ends, w i t h o u t b e i n g supposed to i m p l y a foreseen design and hence a designer. H e h o l d s that the lang u a g e of teleology is as natural and accurate as the l a n g u a g e of causality, a n d I think he is right, and not merely in b i o l o g y . A s we h a v e already indicated, in speaking of o b j e c t i v e m i n d ,

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Woodbridge was thinking not solely of the realm of truth investigated by the natural scientist but also of the wider realm which symbolic thinking makes possible, the whole wide range of human culture, of what Santayana calls "the life of the spirit." For Santayana, though he speaks of everything natural as having its ideal fulfillment, nature and spirit tend to fall into separate compartments; for Woodbridge, they are continuous, and all are parts of the one realm of nature, within which one may live "the life of reason." There are many mansions in the great house of the world and few high fences. All this is the kingdom of the true humanist—but perhaps we had better not enter into the controversy concerning who has the best right to the word "humanism." Woodbridge has written briefly, but with a wealth of suggestions, on many themes in the realm of human culture, of history, of classic literature, of morals. We cannot here expand on these suggestions in any adequate manner, and I shall therefore close with a brief consideration of one topic only, ethics. In the days of American national prohibition Woodbridge once had a dream. In the first scene he is upstate, talking with an old farmer and expressing a wish for some of that good old prewar stuff. T h e farmer opines that it might be possible, for a proper consideration. Woodbridge offers to pay any reasonable price. T h e scene changes to a sandbar off Bermuda. T h e farmer dives into the broad Atlantic and comes up with a quart bottle of whiskey. In a flash the scene has changed again, and Woodbridge sits at his desk in the dean's office at Columbia. T h e farmer stands by, expectant. Woodbridge takes his chequebook and fills out one blank cheque: "Please pay to bearer one degree of Bachelor of Arts of Columbia College. (Signed) Frederick J . E. Woodbridge." On another occasion, when a student flung out the challenge, " N a m e something which is an absolute good, a good in itself," Woodbridge replied cheerfully, "Whiskey!" At this rather un-Spino/istic reply

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the student was, to say the least, "flabbergasted." I hope the reader will not be equally shocked and humorlessly record that Woodbridge must have been a heavy-drinking man and an ethical materialist. He was merely puncturing pomposities and indicating that in his opinion the goods of life are just those specific things we find to be good. W e find them empirically, by trial, and in considerable numbers. W e cling to what is thus found good. W e compare them in retrospect. W e seek to get more of them. W e organize them into the scheme of our life. In this he is really fairly close again to Spinoza, not to the Spinoza of the grand stratosphere flight at the close of the Ethics, but to the Spinoza of the life of "enlightened selfinterest" so attractively expounded in the often neglected pages entitled, rather misleadingly, " O f H u m a n Bondage." T h e r e are difficulties. Spinoza, it will be recalled, gets across somehow from mere self-interest to social living by an exhortation to be reasonable and by the thought that "nothing is so useful to a man as is another m a n , " itself a favorite Woodbridge quotation. I like the empirical and specific approach to ethics, as Woodbridge sees it, without being too much impressed by Spinoza's metaphysical thesis that the good things are those which lead to "increase of our being," if this means anything more than the truism that the more we have which is worth having the fuller is our life. Nor is it wholly a truism: life may be too full, and each man must choose for himself how much he can enjoy. Each life is a separate creation in the art of living, the more self-chosen the better; and why should lives be alike? B u t everyone should have a chance to find out what he is capable of and can enjoy, and also have a chance to work toward it. It takes many sorts of people to make a world. T h e totalitarian leader would force each life, not merely his own, into the common mold of a servant of the state. You say, " W h y shouldn't he, if that is what he wants?" T h e reply is that the society built on these principles defeats itself in the end. As

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Spinoza said, no society can be permanently strong that sends its best citizens into exile or to the scaffold because of their nonconformity. Originality and diversity are precious to a state. But I see no refutation possible of the value of any sort of life, save in this, that some sorts of life are self-defeating, as are the selfish, the irrational, the bigoted, and the domineering. Woodbridge will never be an influential philosopher, as is his colleague J o h n Dewey. In the university Dewey was a quiet teacher, lacking all the arts of teaching save one, that he inspired many a young man to think for himself by showing how it could be done. In a lecture Dewey was thinking through the subject as he went along—thinking in public—perhaps to remark at the close, with a certain naïveté, that he had got considerable enlightenment from the lecture that day. Dewey was a modest man, and hence the complaint of a Chinese student, "I came around the world to hear Dewey talk about Dewey, and he speaks of Locke and Rousseau and J o h n Stuart Mill, but he never speaks of Dewey." But Dewey outside the classroom has come to stand for a certain point of view and certain ideals. For better or for worse, certainly for better in many instances, these ideals have become a force in American life. T h e imprint of Dewey's thought is on all our normal schools. It shapes the lives of millions of school children here and overseas, though they may never hear his name. From Woodbridge there came no such influence, except on the smaller group that met him face to face. A great personality— that was something you felt at once. A wise man, yes, a regular Dr. Johnson of philosophy—a little too brusque at times, too prompt to settle a complex puzzle by kicking a stone. One wishes he had devoted a great mind to the more technical development of his philosophy, and had let someone else handle the transient problems of an administrative dean.