A Pluralistic Universe Part 12

Mr. Bradley's understanding shows the most extraordinary power of perceiving separations and the most extraordinary impotence in comprehending conjunctions. One would naturally say 'neither or both,'

but not so Mr. Bradley. When a common man a.n.a.lyzes certain _whats_ from out the stream of experience, he understands their distinctness _as thus isolated_. But this does not prevent him from equally well understanding their combination with each other as _originally experienced in the concrete_, or their confluence with new sensible experiences in which they recur as 'the same.' Returning into the stream of sensible presentation, nouns and adjectives, and _thats_ and abstract _whats_, grow confluent again, and the word 'is' names all these experiences of conjunction. Mr. Bradley understands the isolation of the abstracts, but to understand the combination is to him impossible.[1] 'To understand a complex _AB_,' he

[Footnote 1: So far as I catch his state of mind, it is somewhat like this: 'Book,' 'table,' 'on'--how does the existence of these three abstract elements result in _this_ book being livingly on _this_ table? Why isn't the table on the book? Or why doesn't the 'on'

connect itself with another book, or something that is not a table?

Mustn't something _in_ each of the three elements already determine the two others to _it_, so that they do not settle elsewhere or float vaguely? Mustn't the whole fact be _prefigured in each part_, and exist _de jure_ before it can exist _de facto_? But, if so, in what can the jural existence consist, if not in a spiritual miniature of the whole fact's const.i.tution actuating; every partial factor as its purpose? But is this anything but the old metaphysical fallacy of looking behind a fact _in esse_ for the ground of the fact, and finding it in the shape of the very same fact _in posse_? Somewhere we must leave off with a _const.i.tution_ behind which there is nothing.]

says, 'I must begin with _A_ or _B_. And beginning, say with _A_, if I then merely find _B_, I have either lost _A_, or I have got beside _A_, [_the word 'beside' seems here vital, as meaning a conjunction 'external' and therefore unintelligible_] something else, and in neither case have I understood.[1] For my intellect cannot simply unite a diversity, nor has it in itself any form or way of togetherness, and you gain nothing if, beside _A_ and _B_, you offer me their conjunction in fact. For to my intellect that is no more than another external element. And "facts," once for all, are for my intellect not true unless they satisfy it.... The intellect has in its nature no principle of mere togetherness' (pp. 570, 572).

Of course Mr. Bradley has a right to define 'intellect' as the power by which we perceive separations but not unions--provided he give due notice to the reader. But why then claim that such a maimed and amputated power must reign supreme in philosophy, and accuse on its behoof the whole empirical world of irrationality? It is true that he elsewhere (p. 568) attributes to the intellect a _proprius motus_ of transition, but says that

[Footnote 1: Apply this to the case of 'book-on-table'! W.J.]

when he looks for _these_ transitions in the detail of living experience, he 'is unable to verify such a solution' (p. 569).

Yet he never explains what the intellectual transitions would be like in case we had them. He only defines them negatively--they are not spatial, temporal, predicative, or causal; or qualitatively or otherwise serial; or in any way relational as we navely trace relations, for relations _separate_ terms, and need themselves to be hooked on _ad infinitum_. The nearest approach he makes to describing a truly intellectual transition is where he speaks of _A_ and _B_ as being 'united, each from its own nature, in a whole which is the nature of both alike' (p. 570). But this (which, _pace_ Mr. Bradley, seems exquisitely a.n.a.logous to 'taking a congeries in a lump,' if not to 'swamping') suggests nothing but that _conflux_ which pure experience so abundantly offers, as when 's.p.a.ce,' 'white,' and 'sweet'

are confluent in a 'lump of sugar,' or kinesthetic, dermal, and optical sensations confluent in 'my hand.'[1] All that I can verify in the transitions which Mr. Bradley's intellect desiderates as its _proprius motus_ is a reminiscence of these and other sensible conjunctions (especially s.p.a.ce-conjunctions),

[Footnote 1: How meaningless is the contention that in such wholes (or in 'book-on-table,' 'watch-in-pocket,' etc.) the relation is an additional ent.i.ty _between_ the terms, needing itself to be related again to each! Both Bradley (_Appearance and Reality_, pp. 32-33) and Royce (_The World and the Individual_, i, 128) lovingly repeat this piece of profundity.]

but a reminiscence so vague that its originals are not recognized.

Bradley, in short, repeats the fable of the dog, the bone, and its image in the water. With a world of particulars, given in loveliest union, in conjunction definitely various, and variously definite, the 'how' of which you 'understand' as soon as you see the fact of them,[1] for there is no how except the const.i.tution of the fact as given; with all this given him, I say, in pure experience, he asks for some ineffable union in the abstract instead, which, if he gained it, would only be a duplicate of what he has already in his full possession. Surely he abuses the privilege which society grants to all of us philosophers, of being puzzle-headed.

Polemic writing like this is odious; but with absolutism in possession in so many quarters, omission to defend my radical empiricism against its best known champion would count as either superficiality or inability. I have to conclude that its dialectic has not invalidated in the least degree the usual conjunctions by which the world, as experienced, hangs so variously together. In particular it leaves an empirical theory of knowledge intact, and lets us continue to believe with common sense that one object _may_ be known, if we have any ground for thinking that it _is_ known, to many knowers.

[Footnote 1: The 'why' and the 'whence' are entirely other questions, not under discussion, as I understand Mr. Bradley. Not how experience gets itself born, but how it can be what it is after it is born, is the puzzle.]

APPENDIX B

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY[1]

... Mr. Bradley calls the question of activity a scandal to philosophy, and if one turns to the current literature of the subject--his own writings included--one easily gathers what he means.

The opponents cannot even understand one another. Mr. Bradley says to Mr. Ward: 'I do not care what your oracle is, and your preposterous psychology may here be gospel if you please; ... but if the revelation does contain a meaning, I will commit myself to this: either the oracle is so confused that its signification is not discoverable, or, upon the other hand, if it can be pinned down to any definite statement, then that statement will be false.'[2] Mr. Ward in turn says of Mr. Bradley: 'I cannot even imagine the state of mind to which his description applies.... It reads like an unintentional travesty of Herbartian Psychology by one who has tried to improve upon it without being at the pains to master it.' Munsterberg excludes a view opposed to his own by saying that with any one who holds it a _verstandigung_ with him is '_grundsatzlich ausgeschlossen_'; and Royce,

[Footnote 1: President's Address before the American Psychological a.s.sociation, December, 1904. Reprinted from the _Psychological Review_, vol. xii, 1905, with slight verbal revision.]

[Footnote 2: _Appearance and Reality_, p. 117. Obviously written _at_ Ward, though Ward's name is not mentioned.]

in a review of Stout,[1] hauls him over the coals at great length for defending 'efficacy' in a way which I, for one, never gathered from reading him, and which I have heard Stout himself say was quite foreign to the intention of his text.

In these discussions distinct questions are habitually jumbled and different points of view are talked of _durcheinander_.

(1) There is a psychological question: Have we perceptions of activity? and if so, what are they like, and when and where do we have them?

(2) There is a metaphysical question: Is there a _fact_ of activity?

and if so, what idea must we frame of it? What is it like? and what does it do, if it does anything? And finally there is a logical question:

(3) Whence do we _know_ activity? By our own feelings of it solely? or by some other source of information? Throughout page after page of the literature one knows not which of these questions is before one; and mere description of the surface-show of experience is proffered as if it implicitly answered every one of them. No one of the disputants, moreover, tries to show what pragmatic consequences his own view would carry, or what a.s.signable particular differences in any one's experience it would make if his adversary's were triumphant.

[Footnote 1: _Mind_, N.S., VI, 379.]

It seems to me that if radical empiricism be good for anything, it ought, with its pragmatic method and its principle of pure experience, to be able to avoid such tangles, or at least to simplify them somewhat. The pragmatic method starts from the postulate that there is no difference of truth that doesn't make a difference of fact somewhere; and it seeks to determine the meaning of all differences of opinion by making the discussion hinge as soon as possible upon some practical or particular issue. The principle of pure experience is also a methodical postulate. Nothing shall be admitted as fact, it says, except what can be experienced at some definite time by some experient; and for every feature of fact ever so experienced, a definite place must be found somewhere in the final system of reality.

In other words: Everything real must be experienceable somewhere, and every kind of thing experienced must somewhere be real.

Armed with these rules of method, let us see what face the problems of activity present to us.

By the principle of pure experience, either the word 'activity' must have no meaning at all, or else the original type and model of what it means must lie in some concrete kind of experience that can be definitely pointed out. Whatever ulterior judgments we may eventually come to make regarding activity, _that sort_ of thing will be what the judgments are about. The first step to take, then, is to ask where in the stream of experience we seem to find what we speak of as activity.

What we are to think of the activity thus found will be a later question.

Now it is obvious that we are tempted to affirm activity wherever we find anything _going on_. Taken in the broadest sense, any apprehension of something _doing_, is an experience of activity. Were our world describable only by the words 'nothing happening,' 'nothing changing,' 'nothing doing,' we should unquestionably call it an 'inactive' world. Bare activity, then, as we may call it, means the bare fact of event or change. 'Change taking place' is a unique content of experience, one of those 'conjunctive' objects which radical empiricism seeks so earnestly to rehabilitate and preserve.

The sense of activity is thus in the broadest and vaguest way synonymous with the sense of 'life.' We should feel our own subjective life at least, even in noticing and proclaiming an otherwise inactive world. Our own reaction on its monotony would be the one thing experienced there in the form of something coming to pa.s.s.

This seems to be what certain writers have in mind when they insist that for an experient to be at all is to be active. It seems to justify, or at any rate to explain, Mr. Ward's expression that we _are_ only as we are active,[1]

[Footnote 1: _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, vol. ii, p. 245. One thinks naturally of the peripatetic _actus primus_ and _actus secundus_ here.]

for we _are_ only as experients; and it rules out Mr. Bradley's contention that 'there is no original experience of anything like activity.' What we ought to say about activities thus simply given, whose they are, what they effect, or whether indeed they effect anything at all--these are later questions, to be answered only when the field of experience is enlarged.

Bare activity would thus be predicable, though there were no definite direction, no actor, and no aim. Mere restless zigzag movement, or a wild _ideenflucht_, or _rhapsodie der wahrnehmungen_, as Kant would say, would const.i.tute an active as distinguished from an inactive world.

But in this actual world of ours, as it is given, a part at least of the activity comes with definite direction; it comes with desire and sense of goal; it comes complicated with resistances which it overcomes or succ.u.mbs to, and with the efforts which the feeling of resistance so often provokes; and it is in complex experiences like these that the notions of distinct agents, and of pa.s.sivity as opposed to activity arise. Here also the notion of causal efficacy comes to birth. Perhaps the most elaborate work ever done in descriptive psychology has been the a.n.a.lysis by various recent writers of the more complex activity-situations. In their descriptions, exquisitely subtle some of them,[1] the activity appears as the _gestalt-qualitat_

[Footnote 1: Their existence forms a curious commentary on Professor Munsterberg's dogma that will-att.i.tudes are not describable. He himself has contributed in a superior way to their description, both in his _Willenshandlung_, and in his _Grundzuge_, Part II, chap, ix, -- 7.]

or the _fundirte inhalt_ (or as whatever else you may please to call the conjunctive form) which the content falls into when we experience it in the ways which the describers set forth. Those factors in those relations are what we _mean_ by activity-situations; and to the possible enumeration and acc.u.mulation of their circ.u.mstances and ingredients there would seem to be no natural bound. Every hour of human life could contribute to the picture gallery; and this is the only fault that one can find with such descriptive industry--where is it going to stop? Ought we to listen forever to verbal pictures of what we have already in concrete form in our own b.r.e.a.s.t.s?[1]

They never take us off the superficial plane. We knew the facts already--less spread out and separated, to be sure--but we knew them still. We always felt our own activity, for example, as 'the expansion of an idea with which our Self is identified, against an obstacle'; and the following out of such a definition through a mult.i.tude of cases elaborates the obvious so as to be little more than an exercise in synonymic speech.

All the descriptions have to trace familiar outlines, and to use familiar terms. The activity is, for example,

[Footnote 1: I ought myself to cry _peccavi_, having been a voluminous sinner in my own chapter on the will.]

attributed either to a physical or to a mental agent, and is either aimless or directed. If directed, it shows tendency. The tendency may or may not be resisted. If not, we call the activity immanent, as when a body moves in empty s.p.a.ce by its momentum, or our thoughts wander at their own sweet will. If resistance is met, _its_ agent complicates the situation. If now, in spite of resistance, the original tendency continues, effort makes its appearance, and along with effort, strain or squeeze. Will, in the narrower sense of the word, then comes upon the scene, whenever, along with the tendency, the strain and squeeze are sustained. But the resistance may be great enough to check the tendency, or even to reverse its path. In that case, we (if 'we' were the original agents or subjects of the tendency) are overpowered.

The phenomenon turns into one of tension simply, or of necessity succ.u.mbed--to, according as the opposing power is only equal, or is superior to ourselves.

Whosoever describes an experience in such terms as these, describes an experience _of_ activity. If the word have any meaning, it must denote what there is found. _There_ is complete activity in its original and first intention. What it is 'known-as' is what there appears. The experiencer of such a situation possesses all that the idea contains.

He feels the tendency, the obstacle, the will, the strain, the triumph, or the pa.s.sive giving up, just as he feels the time, the s.p.a.ce, the swiftness or intensity, the movement, the weight and color, the pain and pleasure, the complexity, or whatever remaining characters the situation may involve. He goes through all that ever can be imagined where activity is supposed. If we suppose activities to go on outside of our experience, it is in forms like these that we must suppose them, or else give them some other name; for the word 'activity' has no imaginable content whatever save these experiences of process, obstruction, striving, strain, or release, ultimate _qualia_ as they are of the life given us to be known.

Were this the end of the matter, one might think that whenever we had successfully lived through an activity-situation we should have to be permitted, without provoking contradiction, to say that we had been really active, that we had met real resistance and had really prevailed. Lotze somewhere says that to be an ent.i.ty all that is necessary is to _gelten_ as an ent.i.ty, to operate, or be felt, experienced, recognized, or in any way realized, as such. In our activity-experiences the activity a.s.suredly fulfils Lotze's demand.

It makes itself _gelten_. It is witnessed at its work. No matter what activities there may really be in this extraordinary universe of ours, it is impossible for us to conceive of any one of them being either lived through or authentically known otherwise than in this dramatic shape of something sustaining a felt purpose against felt obstacles and overcoming or being overcome. What 'sustaining' means here is clear to any one who has lived through the experience, but to no one else; just as 'loud,' 'red,' 'sweet,' mean something only to beings with ears, eyes, and tongues. The _percipi_ in these originals of experience is the _esse_; the curtain is the picture. If there is anything hiding in the background, it ought not to be called activity, but should get itself another name.

This seems so obviously true that one might well experience astonishment at finding so many of the ablest writers on the subject flatly denying that the activity we live through in these situations is real. Merely to feel active is not to be active, in their sight.

The agents that appear in the experience are not real agents, the resistances do not really resist, the effects that appear are not really effects at all.[1] It is evident from this that

[Footnote 1: _Verborum gratia_:'The feeling of activity is not able, qua feeling, to tell us anything about activity' (Loveday: _Mind_, N.S., X., 403); 'A sensation or feeling or sense of activity ... is not, looked at in another way, a feeling of activity at all. It is a mere sensation shut up within which you could by no reflection get the idea of activity.... Whether this experience is or is not later on a character essential to our perception and our idea of activity, it, as it comes first, is not in itself an experience of activity at all. It, as it comes first, is only so for extraneous reasons and only so for an outside observer' (Bradley, _Appearance and Reality_, 2d edition, p. 605); 'In dem tatigkeitsgefuhle leigt an sich nicht der geringste beweis fur das vorhandensein einer psychischen tatigkeit'

(Munsterberg: _Grundzuge_, etc., p. 67). I could multiply similar quotations, and would have introduced some of them into my text to make it more concrete, save that the mingling of different points of view in most of these author's discussions (not in Munsterberg's) make it impossible to disentangle exactly what they mean. I am sure in any case to be accused of misrepresenting them totally, even in this note, by omission of the context, so the less I name names and the more I stick to abstract characterization of a merely possible style of opinion, the safer it will be. And apropos of misunderstandings, I may add to this note a complaint on my own account. Professor Stout, in the excellent chapter on 'Mental Activity,' in vol. i of his _a.n.a.lytic Psychology_, takes me to task for identifying spiritual activity with certain muscular feelings, and gives quotations to bear him out. They are from certain paragraphs on 'the Self,' in which my attempt was to show what the central nucleus of the activities that we call 'ours'

is. I found it in certain intracephalic movements which we habitually oppose, as 'subjective,' to the activities of the transcorporeal world. I sought to show that there is no direct evidence that we feel the activity of an inner spiritual agent as such (I should now say the activity of 'consciousness' as such, see my paper 'Does consciousness exist?' in the _Journal of Philosophy_, vol. i, p. 477). There are, in fact, three distinguishable 'activities' in the field of discussion: the elementary activity involved in the mere _that_ of experience, in the fact that _something_ is going on, and the farther specification of this _something_ into two _whats_, an activity felt as 'ours,' and an activity ascribed to objects. Stout, as I apprehend him, identifies 'our' activity with that of the total experience-process, and when I circ.u.mscribe it as a part thereof, accuses me of treating it as a sort of external appendage to itself (pp. 162-163), as if I 'separated the activity from the process which is active.' But all the processes in question are active, and their activity is inseparable from their being. My book raised only the question of _which_ activity deserved the name of 'ours.' So far as we are 'persons,' and contrasted and opposed to an 'environment,' movements in our body figure as our activities; and I am unable to find any other activities that are ours in this strictly personal sense. There is a wider sense in which the whole 'choir of heaven and furniture of the earth,' and their activities, are ours, for they are our 'objects.' But 'we' are here only another name for the total process of experience, another name for all that is, in fact; and I was dealing with the personal and individualized self exclusively in the pa.s.sages with which Professor Stout finds fault.