Jacques Maritain Center :
Theories of Knowledge / by Leslie J. Walker, S.J.
I. -- EXPOSITION.
§ 202. In spite of certain remarks of Professor James and Dr. Schiller, to the effect that Pragmatism is compatible with almost any metaphysics, it has, if not its own metaphysics, at least a marked and unmistakable tendency toward the metaphysics of Pure Experience. Professor James' "World of Pure Experience" seems to be metaphysical in character.{1} Avenarius, the philosopher of the German pragmatists, is certainly a metaphysician, and his principal work is entitled Eine Kritik der reinen Erfahrung. M. Le Roy in France, Professor Dewey in America, Professor Mach in Germany, and Dr. Schiller in England, all adopt an attitude in regard to metaphysics which closely resembles, if it is not identical with, that which is known as the philosophy of Pure Experience. Pragmatism, in fact, and the philosophy of Pure Experience go hand in hand, and to separate them is to reduce the former to a mere method, which, whatever it was, it certainly is not now. Pragmatism has changed since it parted company with its founder, Dr. Peirce ; and however purely methodological his intentions may have been, Pragmatism is now a theory of knowledge, and as such it presupposes metaphysics, and must, if it desires to be intelligible, give some account of the relation of the knower to the known.
§ 203. From the psychological standpoint we have already treated of the view taken of this relation by Professors James and Dewey: and sufficient, I think, has already been said to make it clear that the philosophy of Pure Experience is a modern form of Empiricism. There is nothing but experience. Everything is experience; and the only function of one experience is to lead to another experience. There are no objects apart from experience, for objective reference is but an accident incidental to the transitional and truncated nature of many of our experiences. Substances, accidents, powers, selves, absolutes are not required. A world of Pure Experience needs no bedding. Such a world is merely an aggregate of experiences which 'hang together by their edges,' and which 'proliferate into one another by transitions;' and these transitions, whether conjunctive or disjunctive, continue the experimental tissue and so form part and parcel with experience.{2}
Pure Experience is defined as 'the original flux of life before reflection has categorised it;'{3} and Professor James is of opinion that we actually get back to pure experience at times; for he tells us that "the instant field of the present is always experience in its 'pure' state, plain unqualified actuality, a simple that, as yet undifferentiated into thing and thought, and only virtually classifiable as objective fact or as some one's opinion about fact."{4} Avenarius, on the other hand (and this is, I think, the view more commonly and also more correctly held) assures us that our experience is never pure. We never get rid of customary forms of representation even in what we call presentation. Whether our experience be that of common-sense, of science, of religion, or of philosophy, in it we always think under categories; and categories do not belong to pure experience, but have been imposed upon it by our ancestors in the past. The tainted state of our experience is obvious. It is, however, our misfortune, not our fault. "Had pure experience," says Professor James, " been always perfectly healthy, there never would have arisen the necessity of isolating or verbalising any of its terms. We should just have experienced inarticulately and unintellectually enjoyed."{5} But it was not so. The tendency of 'raw' experience is to 'extinguish the experient himself,' and this tendency "is lessened just in the degree in which the elements in it that have a practical bearing upon life are analysed out of the continuum and verbally fixed and coupled together, so that we may know what is in the wind for us and get ready to react in time."{6}
§ 204. Among the causes which have contributed to the corruption of pure experience and the generation of our own are others besides those of analysis and verbalisation. M. Le Roy, for whom all truth and all reality are due to l'action-pensée emphasises especially the element of choice.
Even in commonsense knowledge, experience has undergone a transformation and is no longer pure owing to reactions which neglect some elements and modify others . . . . Even in such ordinary notions as the continuity or discontinuity of material objects we exercise choice: we prefer to regard objects which, to sight, are continuous as discontinuous, because it is more convenient; this, however, is merely a fiction pratique.{7}
For the German, Avenarius, on the other hand, physiology seems to be the key alike to psychology and to Philosophy. All changes in experience take for him, as we have already seen,{8} the form of a vital series. Physiological changes begin with some stimulation which disturbs the nervous equilibrium, and finally leads, through reaction, to its restoration. Psychical changes proceed from pain through striving to satisfaction and rest. Thus, when a presentation falls at first to harmonise with previous experience, we invent Bei-begriffe -- 'mediating notions,' as they are styled by Professor James -- and in this way conflict is avoided and harmony, of a kind, restored. The notion of 'incomprehensibility,' for instance, has been invented in order to avoid a conflict between man's free-will and the Omnipotence of God. Our one aim in life is to live in harmony with our environment, and to attain this harmony at the least possible expense. By the Princip des kleinsten Kraftmasses, which is but Professor Mach's Princip der Denkökonomie{9} stated in a more general form, the whole of life is governed. Under it are classed by the latter two subsidiary principles, the Princip der Stetigkeit oder Continuität (Mental action is secundum habitum ), and the Princip der zureichen den Bestimmtheit oder der zureichenden Differenzierung (Changes from expected recurrence produce in our ideas the smallest possible modification compatible with the assimilation of the new idea). It is the operation of these principles as the dominant laws of our conscious life that has led to the corruption of pure experience by the introduction or super-position of categories and ideas which have gradually become permanent as habits of thought.
§ 205. Professor Simmel also takes physiological as the type of psychical processes, but insists more on the anthropomorphic aspect of the development of cognition.
The alternation between rest and motion [he tells us] is not only the physiological condition of our existence, but is also the type of our spiritual life. As we imagine that within ourselves we perceive a psychical being whose existence and character depends only upon itself and is independent of all outside, so we look in the world for substances, magnitudes, forces, whose being and meaning is grounded in themselves alone. As the changeless, the substantial, the fixed, is in our lifecontent an experience so full of value, so thought seeks amid the fluctuations of the phenomenal for something changeless and sure, and from independence proceeds to the self-sufficient, the self-grounded. Thus we gain fixed points which direct us in the confused jumble of phenomena, and give us the objective counterpart of that which we represent as valuable and definitive within ourselves.{10}
§ 206. The anthropomorphism which is characteristic of Professor Simmel's account of the impurities of our experience finds expression also in 'Axioms as Postulates.' For in that now famous essay Dr. Schiller, in the rôle of epistemologist re-edits Aristotle's doctrine of matter and form in a new and striking way. Arguing back from existing knowledge to its conditions, he concludes that the latter were originally (1) minds, and (2) a wholly plastic matter, without quality and without determination, but receptive of forms which minds imposed upon it. Thus the world, as it now appears, has been gradually formed by the combined activity of many minds.{11} In his advance from the Grumps to the Edwin and Angelina stage, and from that to his present state of rationality, man has imposed on its plastic receptivity form upon form, category upon category, with ever-increasing ingenuity and complexity; till at last we have come, by a kind of tacit, mutual consent, to treat these forms as objective, and to attribute them, not to the constructive genius of our ancestors, but to nature itself, which we thus regard as real and independent. 'Facts,' however, as well as concepts, are the product of cognitive functioning.{12} At bottom they are nothing but the 'legacy of past thought,' a 'precipitate' left behind them by our fore-fathers. We seem, in 'facts,' to apprehend reality ready made, because we did not make them. But our fore-fathers made them, much as we now make them when we construct for ourselves new entities such as 'ether' in the hope that in this way we may somehow satisfy our needs. Facts, then, are not only relative to man, but are made by man, evolved, that is, by his experiments upon the plastic material of his experience. 'Reality' and 'truth' alike are the results of human experiments based on human hypotheses and directed to the satisfaction of human needs.{13}
Here we see the result of applying the methods of science to the theory of knowledge. The transformation of pure into impure experience has been brought about by postulation and experiment prompted by human needs, and by this means has been evolved a pseudo-objective world which now seems to us independent and given, simply because it is not we who, as individuals, have made it. For the thorough-going pragmatist the story of 'reality' and the story of 'truth' are one and the same. "What we judge to be 'true,' we take to be 'real,' and accept as a 'fact.' "{14} All three, truth, reality, and fact, arise in like manner from the desire to satisfy the exigencies of our nature, which demand that we should "organise the crude material of experience and transmute it into palatable, manageable and liveable forms." By our experiments we have modified what was once a pure experience, and have imposed upon it forms which by force of habit it seeks to retain. Reality, therefore, alias experience, has lost to a large extent its original plasticity. New forms are no longer accepted with the same readiness as of yore. Our efforts to impose them are restricted, and thus experience has acquired a factitious independence and an illusive objectivity which we construe into a real world, distinct from, and external to, ourselves. In reality, however, there is nothing but experience, or, as M. Le Roy puts it, "The mind is never confronted with anything but itself, its degrees and its moments. The world is its work, and itself, so far as it is made, is its work also. In this, Idealism is right, understood in the sense of an idealism of thought-action."{15}
§ 207. It is strange that Pragmatism should have adopted a philosophic attitude in which the principal doctrine of the rival and much-despised theory of Absolutism seems to be re-asserted. Yet such is the case. In spite of the philosophic impotence of Hegel and the utter uselessness of Absolute philosophies in general, Pragmatism has borrowed and made its own the fundamental principle of all Hegelians, the doctrine of Immanence. English, French, German and American pragmatists alike tell us that knowledge and reality both live immanent within the tissue of experience. There is no need of any transcendental leap from the knower to the known. "In the very bosom of finite experience every conjunction required to make the (cognitive) relation intelligible is given in full."{16} We have seen how this cognitive relation is explained by Professors James and Dewey{17} how they identify the knower with one experience and the known with another, or else with the same experience taken again in a different context; how Professor Dewey talks of odours which know roses, and of certain elements in experiences which know others and which present them as not-present-in-the-same-way-as-themselves-are-present, but as going to be so present through the intervention of certain operations. "Where are the objects of thought?" asks Professor James. "We have no ground for saying that they are outside experience. . . . they may be continuous with the present experience itself."{18} For though "the category of transperceptual reality is now one of the foundations of our life," we can "speculatively imagine a state of pure experience before the hypothesis of permanent objects behind its flux had been framed."{19} Similarly, Dr. Schiller "The reality to which truth was said to correspond, i.e., which it has to know, is not a 'fact in its own right, which pre-exists the cognitive functioning.' it is itself a fact within knowing, immanently deposited or 'precipitated' by the functioning of our thought." Hence it is that the problem of knowledge for the pragmatist is "not -- 'how can thought engender truth about reality?' but, rather, 'how can we best describe the continuous cognitive process which engenders our systems of 'truth' and our acceptance of 'reality and gradually refines them into more and more adequate means for the control of our experience?' "{20}
Thus Pragmatism and Absolutism are at one in regard to the all-important doctrine of Immanence but, further than this, they agree neither in principles, method, nor conclusions. Absolutism frankly acknowledges that it is a theory devised in order to explain the universe. Pragmatism, though it also is a theory, claims to be merely describing what is obviously contained in experience. Absolutism is in the strict sense a metaphysic. Pragmatism, too, is metaphysical;{21} but it is so because it cannot help itself. Its metaphysics are an accident, as it were, occasioned by its desire to explain cognition and its consequent attempt to treat of the knower and the known. Both Absolutism and Pragmatism are idealistic; but while Absolutism is a Rationalism, Pragmatism is a form of Empiricism.
§ 208. The points in which Pragmatism differs from other empiricisms, will, I think, be clear. The first is, of course, almost everything that is distinctive of the Postulatory or Experimental Theory of Knowledge. The second is Professor James' theory of Felt-relations, to which I have already referred, and on account of which he has given to his Weltanschauung the name of 'Radical Empiricism.' Radical Empiricism, like all empiricisms, is 'a mosaic philosophy,' a 'philosophy of plural facts;' it 'emphasises parts rather than wholes,' and makes the latter subsidiary and abstract; and, like them, it is definitely opposed to Absolutism, Apriorism, and all forms of mind-stuff theory. But it differs from Empiricism of Hume and Mill in that it admits conjunctive and disjunctive relations as being fully co-ordinate parts of experience. For Radical Empiricism, "the relations that connect experiences must themselves lie experienced relations, and any kind of relations experienced must be accounted as real as anything else in the system."{22} We feel our 'ands,' and 'buts,' and 'ifs,' and ' fors,' just as we feel other impressions which objects make upon our senses. "Prepositions, copulas, and conjunctions, 'is,' 'isn't,' 'then,' 'before,' 'in,' 'on,' 'beside,' 'between,' 'next,' 'like,' 'unlike,' 'as,' 'but,' flower out of the stream of pure experience, the stream of concretes or the sensational stream, as naturally as nouns and adjectives do."{23} All that is real is sensible; and since relations are real, they, too, must be sensible. The Radical Empiricism of Professor James and the 'new' Empiricism of France both possess the chief characteristic of their predecessors. The fundamental principle of Hume is revived. All ideas that are valid must be verified, or, at least, verifiable, in impressions; they must "lead to the face of directly verifying experiences somewhere."{24} Both are reactions against a philosophy too much encumbered with a priori principles.{25} But between the Empiricism of Professor James and that of Hume there is a difference. Ideas are still little more than faint copies of sensations, but they include relations, which are as much experiences as anything else. This is the chief reason why Professor James claims that the empirical attitude which Pragmatism takes up is more radical and at the same time less objectionable than any that Empiricism has hitherto assumed.{26}
§ 209. Closely connected with his doctrine of felt-relations is Professor James' doctrine of the Self. The Self is one of those unnecessary notions of which Radical Empiricism is so anxious to get rid, and certainly of the real self in Professor James' explanation very little remains, less even than was conceded to us in the Principles of Psychology. Felt-relations, we are informed, are of various degrees of intimacy."{27} There is first withness, then nextness, then likeness, then activity (cause and effect), then purpose, and, finally, as the most intimate of all relations, but still a relation and nothing more, the Self. If we bear in mind the fundamental thesis of Professor James' "World of Pure Experience," what he means by affirming that the Self is merely a felt-relation at once becomes clear. There is nothing real and existing except experiences and the felt-transitions, themselves experiences by which we pass from one experience to another. Hence the Self must be either one or the other or both. In fact, it is described as merely a specially intimate felt-relation, or 'co-conscious transition.' "Personal histories are process of change in time, and the change itself is one of the things immediately experienced. 'Change' in this case means continuous as opposed to discontinuous transition. But continuous transition is one sort of a conjunctive relation; and to be a radical empiricist means to hold fast to this relation of all others, for this is the strategic point, the position through which, if a hole be made, all the corruptions of dialectics and all the metaphysics pour into our philosophy. The holding fast to this relation means taking it at its face value, neither less nor more; and to take it at its face value means, first of all, to take it just as we feel it."{28} Since, then, "what I do feel simply when a later moment of my experience succeeds an earlier one, is that though they are two moments, the transition from one to the other is continuous,"{29} it follows that "there is no other nature, no other whatness than this absence of break and this sense of continuity in that most intimate of all conjunctive relations, the passing of one experience into another when they belong to the same self."{30} Thus "a 'mind' or 'personal consciousness' is the name for a series of experiences run together by definite transitions," just as "an objective reality is a series of similar experiences knit together by different transitions."{31}
§ 210. Now it would seem that if I am a certain series of experiences conjunctively run together, and if you are another such series, we could hardly communicate one with another, since my experiences and yours are mutually exclusive. In spite, however, of his mosaic philosophy, Professor James is able to find something in common between us, and so to establish a means of inter-communication True, for the most part, my experiences and yours 'float and dangle,' are 'out of sight, irrelevant and unimaginable.' Nevertheless, they terminate in a 'nucleus of common perception.'{32} This does not mean that our experiences ever terminate in numerically the same identical percept; for all percepts, being the experiences of different minds, are somewhat different, at least in their point of view;{33} but it does mean that they terminate in something which is numerically one and the same. That something is space, or, as Professor Strong prefers to call it, Pseudo-space. Space, then, or place -- for the two terms are not distinguished by Professor James -- affords a means of inter-communication between mind and mind.
That body of yours which you actuate and feel from within must be in the same spot as the body of yours which I see and touch from without. 'There,' for me means where I place my finger. If you do not feel my finger's contact to be therein my sense, when I place it on your body, where then do you feel it? Your inner actuations of your body also meet my finger there; it is there that you resist its push, or shrink back, or sweep the finger aside with your hand. . . . In general terms, then, whatever differing contents our minds may fill a place with, the place itself is a numerically identical content of the two minds, a piece of common property in which, through which, and over which they join.{34}
§ 211. This solution of the difficulty of explaining interaction between mind and mind does but involve us in another. For if mind and matter, the knower and the known, are but aspects into which in retrospection we split the unity of an experience, and if our minds "terminate in the same percept, not merely against it;"{35} if, that is, what is common to you and to me is not merely common but numerically identical and immanent to both of us, then it would seem that we are not different minds at all, but at bottom, and somehow or other, as Mr. Bradley would say, one and the same.
Such a doctrine clearly tends toward Monism. Yet Monism is, by the rigid empiricist, emphatically denied, and many categorical assertions might be found in the writings of Professor James with which it is in direct contradiction.{36} It is certainly incompatible with a pluralistic philosophy, and it is also incompatible with the Personal Idealism toward which so many pragmatists tend (though so, for that matter, is the above inadequate account of the Self). And in any case, it would hardly do for Professor James, who is at present at war with the Absolute, to borrow a second doctrine from Absolutism in addition to that of Immanence For the present, therefore, he is content to affirm that
round the nucleus, partly continuous and partly discrete, of what we call the physical world of actual perception, Innumerable hosts of thinkers, pursuing their several lines of physically true cogitation trace paths that intersect one another only at discontinuous perceptual points, and the rest of the time are quite incongruent.{37}
Yet Professor James is inclined to adopt some form of Panpsychism, for the 'beyond' in a philosophy of experience, he tells us, must itself be "of an experimental nature;" and "if not a future experience of our own or a present one of our neighbour, it must be an experience for itself." Hence, although "the world is so far forth a pluralism of which the unity is not fully experienced as yet," even Professor James does not deny that ultimately an Erfahrungseinheit may be possible.{38}
§ 212. The philosophy of Avenarius is not essentially different in its conclusions from that of Professor James. Avenarius, too, seems to have adopted provisionally a kind of Panpsychism or Personal Idealism, though, like the latter, he thinks that individual minds are tending toward homogeneity, if not toward actual unity. He, too, reduces everything to experience, and distinguishes within it a subjective and an objective aspect. His presentment of his philosophy, however, differs considerably from that of the sketchy style adopted in the metaphysical articles of Professor James, though, unfortunately, it is also much encumbered by a new and quite unnecessary terminology. Avenarius' Empirio-Criticism is only another name for the philosophy of Pure Experience. We may regard experience either from an absolute or from a relative point of view, i.e., we may either consider the relation of an object (R) to a percept (E), or we may substitute for (E) a brain-state (Cm) (the Empirio-Critical substitution) and consider the relation of R to C. In either case our results will be the same; for the psychical character of an experience and its objective contents are but different aspects of the same entity, experience, and between them there is a functional relation. Hence, for the independent vital series, pain -- striving -- satisfaction, may be substituted the dependent vital series, stimulus -- reaction -- equilibrium; and this is a law which holds throughout experience. The oscillations of (R), the objective aspect of experience, is always the correlative of (5), the subjective aspect. The magnitude of the oscillations corresponds to the intensity of consciousness; their direction, according as it is toward or away from equilibrium, means pleasure or pain. A habitual series is the correlative of familiarity and certitude, while a new series means a modification of habit in the physiological order and a Heterotote, i.e., a modification of knowledge, in the psychical.
§ 213. Character (feeling, perceiving, willing, knowing) may in all experiences be distinguished from content (what is perceived or thought), but it is distinguished only in retrospection, and is perceived immediately and spatially precisely in the same manner as content. (This, by the way, is the first axiom of Empirio-Criticism.) Since, then, character, which we ascribe to the self, is just as objective as content, which we ascribe to an objective world, some other difference must be found by which to distinguish the self from the not-self. This difference for Avenarius, as for Professor James, lies in the peculiar intimacy of the relations or transitions which hold within the former.
Other selves or minds are known by the Empirio-Critical Postulate, and not by Introjection, which is the method by which common-sense imagines that it attains to this piece of knowledge. In Introjection man first attributes to his likes, feelings and thoughts similar to his own, and in this way distinguishes two worlds, the world of consciousness or minds and the world of material objects. This he sets down as an intuition. But when he comes to reflect, he finds that he cannot explain how the two worlds, if distinct, can interact; and so comes to the conclusion that his intuition was not an intuition at all, but a very bad inference, which he proceeds to correct by becoming a subjective idealist and denying the existence of any objective world at all. The subjective idealist, however, is fundamentally wrong, for the objective is just as much an aspect of experience as the subjective. And his mistake is due to his having supposed that our knowledge of other minds is an intuition, whereas it is really a postulate. The truth is that we are forced to postulate the existence of other selves in order to account for certain elements in our experience; and so long as our experience retains its dual aspect, this hypothetical element in the natürliche Weltbegriff will remain. But should we ever attain to that state in which we 'inarticulately experience and 'unintellectually enjoy,' this dual aspect will disappear and with it will go those hypothetical other selves which are due to analysis and experiment.
§ 214. The aim of a philosophy of Pure Experience, therefore, is not far to seek. Since so much of our experience is now no longer pure, the philosopher must make it his business to purify it. This he can only do by making a clean sweep of all those notions by which our ancestors strove to facilitate thought, but in fact have only encumbered it. Substance, accident, cause, self, must be done away. We must descend to the purer level again. This process of de-intellectualisation is recommended by Professor James; but it is Avenarius who has given us the most intelligent account of the pure experience to which we must return. By philosophy he understands the interpretation of the universe in accordance with the Principle of Least Energy which enjoins upon us that we strive (1) to comprehend the many in the one, and (2) to eliminate all useless ideas (substance, cause, and the like) since they are static, whereas experience is essentially a process and a growth. This done, all that will remain will be impressions. 'Being' must be thought as an impression which presupposes nothing beyond what is apparent to the senses. Impressions are the only real content of experience, while change is the form which experience takes. This is all that the philosopher is concerned with, unless, perhaps, he can complete his work by the discovery of an Empfindungseinheit. And as for science, its characteristics, when the ideal of pure experience has been reached, will be the following. It will be purely descriptive, yet simple, exact, complete. Quality will be reduced to quantity; and laws will treat of quantitative equivalence, not of causal connection or sequence. All values and quantitative relations will be interdependent and mutually deducible one from another. Religion, philosophy and morals also will be characterised by a purely experimental method, and will be regarded from a purely experimental point of view. The vital series will have attained a maximum of simplicity, and the same series will be universal throughout the race. Predispositions, prejudices and individual differences will have disappeared, and their place will be taken by an indefinite variety of minute impressions, leading to reactions of a simple and invariable type. In short, when the ideal of pure experience has been realised, man will have become a mere machine, so that no matter what particular specimen of humanity you may choose, if you press the same lever you will get the same feeling and the same performance will take place.
§ 215. Before proceeding to a discussion of the philosophy described in the chapter, I should like to call attention to what is, to say the least, a somewhat remarkable coincidence. It is this: M. Abel Rey, in a work entitled La théorie de la Physique chez les Physiciens contemporains, after a careful examination of the theories and methods of Newton, Rankine, Mach, Ostwald, and Duhem, comes to the conclusion that the philosophy with which physical science is most compatible, even if it does not presuppose it, is a modified form of Positivism which bears a striking resemblance, not only to Pragmatism, but also to the philosophy of Pure Experience.
M. Abel Rey does not profess to be a pragmatist, nor does he acknowledge that he has been influenced by pragmatic ideas. In fact, the only reference which he makes to Pragmatism occurs in a footnote to page 393, where he remarks that certain of his own ideas are analogous to those of Pragmatism, and that Pragmatism for this very reason, provided it abandons the agnosticism toward which it is driven by the fashion of the age, will, like the sceptical criticism of science with which it is connected by numerous bonds, have rendered a service to the experimental rationalism of the future. That this should be the only allusion to Pragmatism in a philosophical treatise of over 400 pages dealing with the theory of knowledge, and with the principles and methods of Mach, Ostwald and Poincaré, all of whom have been claimed as pragmatists, seems to me to be somewhat strange; and is still more so when we consider that the ideas of M. Rey are not merely analogous to those of Pragmatism, but are as emphatically pragmatic as any held by the most whole-hearted pragmatist or humanist.
§ 216. M. Rey claims to be a positivist or an empiricist, though not of the school of Comte and Stuart Mill, whose Empiricism he rejects because it gives us no satisfactory theory of the categories. The categories, says M. Rey, are not forms of the mind any more than they are forms of objective reality, but are due to the purposive adaptation of the habitual activities of mind to the demands of objective experience. Nay, more, the opposition of mind and matter is itself strictly relative. Objective experience is not something exterior and independent of mind. "Objective experience and mind are implied one in the other and exist and develop one through the other."{39} Hence, the categories must be treated historically. Since they result from evolution they must have a historical signification. Their nature is psychological and social; perhaps even biological.{40}
From this point of view M. Rey approaches the question of truth. All truths for him, as for Dr. Schiller, are human truths and have been gradually evolved. They are the result of choice made by man with a view to adapting himself to his environment. Their apparent self-evidence and fixity is due to force of habit." Little by little our truths have acquired a certain stability like to biological immunity, so that certain ways of thinking have become ours and exclude at the cost of destroying our thinking organism the possibility of becoming other than they are." In this process of adaptation, by which truth has been acquired, moreover, man has been guided throughout by utility and by practical considerations, a criterion which, we are warned, as usual, must be taken not vulgari modo, but in a most noble sense. The usual pragmatic conclusion also is drawn. Since all truths have a history and are due to the combined product of the mind of man and of his environment, the psychological structure of man must leave an indelible trace even on scientific truths which will ever carry in consequence the mark of human fabrication.
§ 217. In his discussion of the validity of physical theories (Book V.) and of the inferences which may be drawn from science in regard to the theory of knowledge in general, therefore, M. Rey has really given us a brief, but vigorous, exposition of many of the leading doctrines of the pragmatist. Not only this, but by combining his Pragmatism with a philosophy of Pure Experience, he affords but another instance of the marked tendency of Pragmatism toward this philosophy, and at the same time has brought out clearly the difficulties with which Pragmatism is involved if this is in truth the end toward which it inevitably leads. M. Rey believes that his conclusions in regard to truth and reality follow logically from the principles and methods of science. Here I cannot agree with him.{41} Yet by starting from the scientific point of view, M. Rey, though not professedly a pragmatist, seems to throw considerable light upon the metaphysical aspect of the pragmatic theory of knowledge.
The first problem of knowledge, viz., in what does knowledge consist, M. Rey pronounces insoluble. Knowledge for him is a unique and mysterious relation which arises, we know not how, from the adaptation of man to his environment. We cannot say in what precisely knowledge consists. All we can do is to trace more or less imperfectly its history. It is useless to define knowledge or truth as adaequatio mentis ad rem, for mind and its object are essentially relative and must not be treated as if they were independent and distinct. Everything, in fact, is a relation. Experience itself is a relation, a system of relations. Relations are the given, and when we analyse them we do but come across further relations.{42} Terms are only the means by which relations are expressed, and when we try to define them we have to fall back upon relations. Knowledge, experience, reality are ultimately one and the same thing; they constitute the relation, ce qui est. But what this is must ever remain a mystery.
The solution of the second problem of knowledge on these lines is simplicity itself. Ab esse ad posse valet illatio. Knowledge is possible because it is ce qui est. There are no conditions to enquire into, since neither subject nor object can exist apart from the relation from which they arise as co-relative terms. Mind is unintelligible apart from matter. Hence those theories of knowledge -- and they are, alas, in the majority -- which place matter on the one side and mind on the other as distinct entities, and which then enquire how they can be brought together or how one can come to know the other, are theories which start from an altogether erroneous standpoint and are vitiated throughout by this fundamental fallacy. We may, indeed, speak of knowledge psychologically, regarding it as a complexus of habits; but further than this we cannot go, for "L'ensemble de ces habitudes est, dans la seule langue que nous puissions comprendre, ce qui est."{43}
§ 218. When we consider the relativistic attitude at present adopted by many scientists, it is not very surprising that M. Rey should have arrived at a philosophy in which relation is, as with Renouvier and Green, the Category of categories, and in which the mass of relational appearance which Mr. Bradley holds must somehow qualify the real, is itself identified with the real. But M. Rey has carried his Relativism much further than do the pragmatists, and further, too, than his premises will justify. Science is certainly concerned with relations, since it deals, for the most part, with quantitative changes, and these are strictly relative. It is difficult to understand, however, how the objects which the scientist examines can possibly be due to the relations which hold between them. Can the definite and simple ratio which holds between the volumes of combining gases and the volume of the compound gas that results in any way account for the volumes and the gases themselves? Can 'resemblances,' of themselves, account for the respective functions and organic structures of allied species of animals? Is it not rather the other way about, that the relations arise from the objects themselves, the equality of volume from the respective volumes of the gases which combine, the specific resemblances from the structure and functions of the animals concerned? M. Rey, at any rate, is hardly justified in returning to the view of Renouvier and Green without at least giving some further reason for his opinion than the mere fact that science is concerned chiefly with relations.
§ 219 Apart, however, from this exaggerated Relativism, the remarkable similarity between the philosophy of M. Rey and the pragmatic philosophy of Pure Experience, can hardly fail to be noticed. The identification of knowledge with experience and the further identification of experience with ce qui est is clearly the principal thesis upon which the philosophy of Pure Experience is built. Even for the Relativism which characterises M. Rey's theory one may find an analogy in Professor James' dual-aspect view of experience in which conjunctive and disjunctive relations play so important a part. And when one reflects that this theory is the logical consequence of M. Rey's pragmatic attitude in regard to the nature of truth, it at any rate suggests that the philosophy of Pure Experience is the natural, if not the necessary, complement of the doctrine that truth consists in a complexus of habits which have acquired a comparative stability on account of the useful consequences to which they lead.
{1} cf. supra, § 109.
{2} "A World of Pure Experience," Journ. of Phil., Psy. and Sc. Methods, 3904, pp. 533 et seq. (passim), and cf. Studies in Humanism, p. 461.
{3} A Pluralistic Universe, p. 348, and cf. Studies in Humanism, p. 221.
{4} "A World of Pure Experience," p. 564.
{5} A Pluralistic Universe, p. 350. (These words are attributed to the naturalist but in the original article in the Journ. of Phil., etc., p. 35, they were attributed to the pragmatist). Cf. The Meaning of Truth, p. 64, and Studies in Humanism pp. 485, 486.
{6} A Pluralistic Universe, p. 350.
{7} Bulletin de la Soc. Française Philosophique, 1902, p. 177. cf. Studies in Humanism, pp. 188, 189.
{8} cf. supra, 130.
{9} cf. supra, § 127.
{10} Philosophie des Geldes, chap. iii., pp. 58, 59.
{11} cf. Studies in Humanism, p. 461.
{12} cf. ibid., pp. 183, 461, and Humanism, p. 11 (note) and p. 55.
{13} 'Axioms as Postulates,' §§ 1-8 (passim).
{14} Studies in Humanism, p. 426.
{15} Bulletin de la Soc. Français philosophique, 1904, p. 166,
{16} The Meaning of Truth, pp. 102, 103.
{17} Vide chap. vi.
{18} Mind, N.S. 32, p. 563.
{19} The Meaning of Truth, pp. 64, 63, and 68.
{20} Studies in Humanism, p. 426, and cf. pp. 202, 202.
{21} On this point cf. supra § 221.
{22} "A World of Pure Experience," p. 534.
{23} A Pluralistic Universe p. 349.
{24} Pragmatism, p. 215.
{25} cf. Le Roy, Revue Met. et Morale, 1901, p. 140.
{26} Pragmatism, p. 51.
{27} "A World of Pure Experience." p. 535.
{28} "A World of Pure Experience," p. 536.
{29} Ibid.
{30} Ibid., p. 537.
{31} Ibid., p. 566.
{32} Ibid., pp. 535, 536.
{33} Ibid., p. 567.
{34} Ibid., pp. 567, 568.
{35} Ibid., p. 567.
{36} e.g., in A Pluralistic Universe (passim).
{37} Ibid., p. and cf. The Meaning of Truth, pp. 113, 114.
{38} loc. cit., p. 569, and cf. A Pluralistic Universe, p. 328.
{39} op. cit., p. 393.
{40} Ibid., p 397.
{41} Cf. chaps. xvii., xviii. on Pragmatism and Realism in Physical Science.
{42} op. cit.. p. 394.
{43} Ibid., p. 395.