A Pluralistic Universe Part 10

To this particular objection, at any rate, it is easy to reply.

In using concepts of his own to discredit the theoretic claims of concepts generally, Bergson does not contradict, but on the contrary emphatically ill.u.s.trates his own view of their practical role, for they serve in his hands only to 'orient' us, to show us to what quarter we must _practically turn_ if we wish to gain that completer insight into reality which he denies that they can give. He directs our hopes away from them and towards the despised sensible flux. _What he reaches by their means is thus only a new practical att.i.tude_. He but restores, against the vetoes of intellectualist philosophy, our naturally cordial relations with sensible experience and common sense.

This service is surely only practical; but it is a service for which we may be almost immeasurably grateful. To trust our senses again with a good philosophic conscience!--who ever conferred on us so valuable a freedom before?

By making certain distinctions and additions it seems easy to meet the other counts of the indictment. Concepts are realities of a new order, with particular relations between them. These relations are just as much directly perceived, when we compare our various concepts, as the distance between two sense-objects is perceived when we look at it.

Conception is an operation which gives us material for new acts of perception, then; and when the results of these are written down, we get those bodies of 'mental truth' (as Locke called it) known as mathematics, logic, and _a priori_ metaphysics. To know all this truth is a theoretic achievement, indeed, but it is a narrow one; for the relations between conceptual objects as such are only the static ones of bare comparison, as difference or sameness, congruity or contradiction, inclusion or exclusion. Nothing _happens_ in the realm of concepts; relations there are 'eternal' only. The theoretic gain fails so far, therefore, to touch even the outer hem of the real world, the world of causal and dynamic relations, of activity and history. To gain insight into all that moving life, Bergson is right in turning us away from conception and towards perception.

By combining concepts with percepts, _we can draw maps of the distribution_ of other percepts in distant s.p.a.ce and time. To know this distribution is of course a theoretic achievement, but the achievement is extremely limited, it cannot be effected without percepts, and even then what it yields is only static relations. From maps we learn positions only, and the position of a thing is but the slightest kind of truth about it; but, being indispensable for forming our plans of action, the conceptual map-making has the enormous practical importance on which Bergson so rightly insists.

But concepts, it will be said, do not only give us eternal truths of comparison and maps of the positions of things, they bring new _values_ into life. In their mapping function they stand to perception in general in the same relation in which sight and hearing stand to touch--Spencer calls these higher senses only organs of antic.i.p.atory touch. But our eyes and ears also open to us worlds of independent glory: music and decorative art result, and an incredible enhancement of life's value follows. Even so does the conceptual world bring new ranges of value and of motivation to our life. Its maps not only serve us practically, but the mere mental possession of such vast pictures is of itself an inspiring good. New interests and incitements, and feelings of power, sublimity, and admiration are aroused.

Abstractness _per se_ seems to have a touch of ideality. ROYCE'S 'loyalty to loyalty' is an excellent example. 'Causes,' as anti-slavery, democracy, liberty, etc., dwindle when realized in their sordid particulars. The veritable 'cash-value' of the idea seems to cleave to it only in the abstract status. Truth at large, as ROYCE contends, in his _Philosophy of Loyalty_, appears another thing altogether from the true particulars in which it is best to believe.

It transcends in value all those 'expediencies,' and is something to live for, whether expedient or inexpedient. Truth with a big T is a 'momentous issue'; truths in detail are 'poor sc.r.a.ps,' mere 'crumbling successes.' (_Op. cit._, Lecture VII, especially -- v.)

Is, now, such bringing into existence of a new _value_ to be regarded as a theoretic achievement? The question is a nice one, for altho a value is in one sense an objective quality perceived, the essence of that quality is its relation to the will, and consists in its being a dynamogenic spur that makes our action different. So far as their value-creating function goes, it would thus appear that concepts connect themselves more with our active than with our theoretic life, so here again Bergson's formulation seems un.o.bjectionable. Persons who have certain concepts are animated otherwise, pursue their own vital careers differently. It doesn't necessarily follow that they understand other vital careers more intimately.

Again it may be said that we combine old concepts into new ones, conceiving thus such realities as the ether, G.o.d, souls, or what not, of which our sensible life alone would leave us altogether ignorant.

This surely is an increase of our knowledge, and may well be called a theoretical achievement. Yet here again Bergson's criticisms hold good. Much as conception may tell us _about_ such invisible objects, it sheds no ray of light into their interior. The completer, indeed, our definitions of ether-waves, atoms, G.o.ds, or souls become, the less instead of the more intelligible do they appear to us. The learned in such things are consequently beginning more and more to ascribe a solely instrumental value to our concepts of them. Ether and molecules may be like co-ordinates and averages, only so many crutches by the help of which we practically perform the operation of getting about among our sensible experiences.

We see from these considerations how easily the question of whether the function of concepts is theoretical or practical may grow into a logomachy. It may be better from this point of view to refuse to recognize the alternative as a sharp one. The sole thing that is certain in the midst of it all is that Bergson is absolutely right in contending that the whole life of activity and change is inwardly impenetrable to conceptual treatment, and that it opens itself only to sympathetic apprehension at the hands of immediate feeling. All the _whats_ as well as the _thats_ of reality, relational as well as terminal, are in the end contents of immediate concrete perception.

Yet the remoter unperceived _arrangements_, temporal, spatial, and logical, of these contents, are also something that we need to know as well for the pleasure of the knowing as for the practical help. We may call this need of arrangement a theoretic need or a practical need, according as we choose to lay the emphasis; but Bergson is accurately right when he limits conceptual knowledge to arrangement, and when he insists that arrangement is the mere skirt and skin of the whole of what we ought to know.

Note 2, page 266.--Gaston Rageot, _Revue Philosophique_, vol. lxiv, p.

85 (July, 1907).

Note 3, page 268.--I have myself talked in other ways as plausibly as I could, in my _Psychology_, and talked truly (as I believe) in certain selected cases; but for other cases the natural way invincibly comes back.

LECTURE VII

Note 1, page 278.--_Introduction to Hume_, 1874, p. 151.

Note 2, page 279.--_Ibid._, pp. 16, 21, 36, _et pa.s.sim_.

Note 3, page 279.--See, _inter alia_, the chapter on the 'Stream of Thought' in my own Psychologies; H. Cornelius, _Psychologie_, 1897, chaps, i and iii; G.H. Luquet, _Idees Generales de Psychologie_, 1906, _pa.s.sim_.

Note 4, page 280.--Compare, as to all this, an article by the present writer, ent.i.tled 'A world of pure experience,' in the _Journal of Philosophy_, New York, vol. i, pp. 533, 561 (1905).

Note 5, page 280.--Green's attempt to discredit sensations by reminding us of their 'dumbness,' in that they do not come already _named_, as concepts may be said to do, only shows how intellectualism is dominated by verbality. The unnamed appears in Green as synonymous with the unreal.

Note 6, page 283.--_Philosophy of Reflection_, i, 248 ff.

Note 7, page 284.--Most of this paragraph is extracted from an address of mine before the American Psychological a.s.sociation, printed in the _Psychological Review_, vol. ii, p. 105. I take pleasure in the fact that already in 1895 I was so far advanced towards my present bergsonian position.

Note 8, page 289.--The conscious self of the moment, the central self, is probably determined to this privileged position by its functional connexion with the body's imminent or present acts. It is the present _acting_ self. Tho the more that surrounds it may be 'subconscious'

to us, yet if in its 'collective capacity' it also exerts an active function, it may be conscious in a wider way, conscious, as it were, over our heads.

On the relations of consciousness to action see Bergson's _Matiere et Memoire, pa.s.sim_, especially chap. i. Compare also the hints in Munsterberg's _Grundzuge der Psychologie_, chap, xv; those in my own _Principles of Psychology_, vol. ii, pp. 581-592; and those in W.

McDougall's _Physiological Psychology_, chap. vii.

Note 9, page 295.--Compare _Zend-Avesta_, 2d edition, vol. i, pp. 165 ff., 181, 206, 244 ff., etc.; _Die Tagesansicht_, etc., chap, v, -- 6; and chap. xv.

LECTURE VIII

Note 1, page 330.--Blondel: _Annales de Philosophie Chretienne_, June, 1906, p. 241.

APPENDICES

APPENDIX A

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS[1]

Experience in its immediacy seems perfectly fluent. The active sense of living which we all enjoy, before reflection shatters our instinctive world for us, is self-luminous and suggests no paradoxes.

Its difficulties are disappointments and uncertainties. They are not intellectual contradictions.

When the reflective intellect gets at work, however, it discovers incomprehensibilities in the flowing process. Distinguishing its elements and parts, it gives them separate names, and what it thus disjoins it cannot easily put together. Pyrrhonism accepts the irrationality and revels in its dialectic elaboration. Other philosophies try, some by ignoring, some by resisting, and some by turning the dialectic procedure against itself, negating its first negations, to restore the fluent sense of life again, and let redemption take the place of innocence. The perfection with which any philosophy may do this is the measure of its human success and of its importance in philosophic history. In an article ent.i.tled 'A world of pure experience,[2] I tried my own hand sketchily at

[Footnote 1: Reprinted from the _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods_, vol. ii, New York, 1905, with slight verbal revision.]

[Footnote 2: _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods_, vol. i, No. 20, p. 566.]

the problem, resisting certain first steps of dialectics by insisting in a general way that the immediately experienced conjunctive relations are as real as anything else. If my sketch is not to appear too _naif_, I must come closer to details, and in the present essay I propose to do so.

I

'Pure experience' is the name which I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories. Only new-born babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows, may be a.s.sumed to have an experience pure in the literal sense of a _that_ which is not yet any definite _what_, tho ready to be all sorts of whats; full both of oneness and of manyness, but in respects that don't appear; changing throughout, yet so confusedly that its phases interpenetrate and no points, either of distinction or of ident.i.ty, can be caught. Pure experience in this state is but another name for feeling or sensation.

But the flux of it no sooner comes than it tends to fill itself with emphases, and these salient parts become identified and fixed and abstracted; so that experience now flows as if shot through with adjectives and nouns and prepositions and conjunctions. Its purity is only a relative term, meaning the proportional amount of unverbalized sensation which it still embodies.

Far back as we go, the flux, both as a whole and in its parts, is that of things conjunct and separated. The great continua of time, s.p.a.ce, and the self envelop everything, betwixt them, and flow together without interfering. The things that they envelop come as separate in some ways and as continuous in others. Some sensations coalesce with some ideas, and others are irreconcilable. Qualities compenetrate one s.p.a.ce, or exclude each other from it. They cling together persistently in groups that move as units, or else they separate. Their changes are abrupt or discontinuous; and their kinds resemble or differ; and, as they do so, they fall into either even or irregular series.

In all this the continuities and the discontinuities are absolutely co-ordinate matters of immediate feeling. The conjunctions are as primordial elements of 'fact' as are the distinctions and disjunctions. In the same act by which I feel that this pa.s.sing minute is a new pulse of my life, I feel that the old life continues into it, and the feeling of continuance in no wise jars upon the simultaneous feeling of a novelty. They, too, compenetrate harmoniously.

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, and they melt into it again as fluidly when we apply them to a new portion of the stream.

II

If now we ask why we must translate experience from a more concrete or pure into a more intellectualized form, filling it with ever more abounding conceptual distinctions, rationalism and naturalism give different replies.

The rationalistic answer is that the theoretic life is absolute and its interests imperative; that to understand is simply the duty of man; and that who questions this need not be argued with, for by the fact of arguing he gives away his case.

The naturalist answer is that the environment kills as well as sustains us, and that the tendency of raw experience to extinguish the experient himself is lessened just in the degree in which the elements in it that have a practical bearing upon life are a.n.a.lyzed 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. Had pure experience, the naturalist says, been always perfectly healthy, there would never have arisen the necessity of isolating or verbalizing any of its terms. We should just have experienced inarticulately and unintellectually enjoyed. This leaning on 'reaction' in the naturalist account implies that, whenever we intellectualize a relatively pure experience, we ought to do so for the sake of redescending to the purer or more concrete level again; and that if an intellect stays aloft among its abstract terms and generalized relations, and does not reinsert itself with its conclusions into some particular point of the immediate stream of life, it fails to finish out its function and leaves its normal race unrun.