The Philosophy of the Act
Essay 21 The Process of Mind in Nature
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A. THE EFFECT OF MODERN PHYSICAL SCIENCE ON THE CONCEPT OF MIND
THREE logically disparate factors have largely influenced the conception of mind
entertained since the period of the Renaissance: the bifurcation of nature, the relation
of the object of experience to the experiencing individual, and the location of contents
in experience which have no definite place in an abstract physical environment.
The conception of nature which was introduced by Galileo, through his doctrine of dynamics, reduced it to a statement of matter in motion. Matter was conceived of as that which effectively occupies space, i.e., resists the tendency of anything else to occupy the place which is occupied by the body in question; possesses inertia, i.e., the tendency to remain in the state of rest or motion in which it is found; has mass, i.e., has a quantity which can be measured, given equal density with other things with which it is compared, by the amount of space occupied; and has mobility, i.e., the ability to pass from one place to another provided its inertia is overcome. There were, of course, other characters of matter which had to be recognized, notably the characters of chemical substances, heat, and those of electricity. Heat was resolved into motion of the physical particles of which the objects of experience are made up. The electrodynamic theory of Matter undertakes to state chemical characters in terms of the changes which result from the structure of so-called chemical substances out of the two sorts of electrical particles, positive and negative, which it assumes are the ultimate constituents of matter. If nature is ultimately made up of positive and negative particles of electricity which possess mass
(358) and inertia, the only other character which it has, apart from the aggregations of these particles and their motions, is that of the differences of the positive and negative particles, which can be stated in terms of mass, volume, and motion.
The more or less tacit acceptance of this doctrine that the reality of material nature can be reduced to terms of extended matter in motion carries with it the implication that these characters of nature which are not those of the effective occupation of space, motion, and the results of these, such as momentum, and in general what are called expressions of energy, do not reside in nature. Color, sound, temperature as felt, odor, taste, as well as all the affective characters of things, could not reside in nature in its reality. The simplest treatment of such characters was to place them in mind, as the effects on mind of the action of a nature which was nothing but matter in motion.
The organism that mediates between nature and mind is itself a natural object and must, therefore, on this conception be stated in terms of matter in motion. The study of it in its mediation between nature and mind can show the natural processes which go on within it when these characters of things, which must be regarded as mental, arise. Thus there arose a physiological psychology. It found itself with a further task upon its hands. These so-called secondary qualities of things could not be separated from the primary qualities, i.e., those answering to the real characters of natural objects (effective occupation of space, mass, inertia, and motion), at least in so far as our perception of them was concerned. The same sort of a biologic process goes on in our perception of things as extended and inert and moving that goes on in our perception of things as colored and sounding. If color and sound were mental, why should not extension) inertia, mass, and motion be mental? And Berkeley drew the logical conclusion that nature in all its characters is mental. Hume pointed out that, while we might be forced into taking this position by logical procedure from the premises from which we started, we could not preserve this belief the moment we stopped philosophizing; and science con-
(359)-tinued to pursue its account of nature unperturbed by the difficulties which its generally accepted doctrines had upon the theory of mind.
What I wish to point out is that the theory of mind found itself obliged to make a place for contents which, for immediate experience, belong as definitely to the outer object as those characters which science conceives to be the nature of the things that are entirely independent of mind.
The mechanical theory of nature which has dominated modern science seems bound to state the relations of minds to matter and of matter to minds in terms of mechanical processes which by their nature leave no place for mind and so-called mental processes. As all mechanical processes can be exhaustively stated in terms of matter in motion, there is no place in its equations for the so-called states of consciousness which became necessary to state the contents of the secondary qualities of things-the effects which objects have upon the mind through the medium of the organism, the imagery which could not be stated in terms of matter and motion, together with the affective characters of things. The logical account of such a situation appeared in a parallelism which assumed conscious states accompanying certain material conditions of the nervous system regarded as a part of a mechanical whole. These conscious states could have no place in the mechanical description of nature. The connections between minds and things became simply that of the simultaneous appearance of certain physical particles in motion and certain conscious states, the former being the conditions for the appearance of the latter. One of the results of this conception has been to translate all conscious activity into states of consciousness which merely accompany the nervous phases of motions in the body. In general, the connections between the experiencing individual and the things experienced -conceived in their physical reality-were reduced to a passive conditioning of states of consciousness by a mechanical nature.
Into such a mind was carried, as previously indicated, whatever in nature could not be stated in terms of matter in motion.
(359) This included not simply the so-called secondary qualities but also the whole content of imagery which goes so largely into our perceptual objects, and especially all the aesthetic and other emotional and affective characters of things. The result of this was to force upon the mind the presentation of the world of actual experience with all its characters, except, perhaps, the so-called primary characters of things. Mind had, therefore, a representational world that was supposed to answer to the physical world, and the connection between this world and the physical world remained a mystery.
B. PRAGMATIC REACTIONS TO A SCIENTIFICALLY INSPIRED DUALISM.
The unsatisfactory result of this division of nature between mind and the physical universe led to the objective idealistic systems in which nature was taken entirely into mind not as the representation of an actual or possible reality outside of mind but as the sum total of reality, the subject-object relation existing not between mind and what lies outside of mind but between different phases of the spiritual process of reality. The undertaking failed, for one reason, because it identified the process of reality with cognition, while experience shows that the reality which cognition seeks lies outside of cognition, was there before cognition arose, and exists in independence of cognition after knowledge has been attained.
Two modern trends of thought have appeared seeking to recognize the independence of nature over against cognition and, at the same time, to return to nature the content which had been placed in mind. Realism has reduced cognition to an awareness by mind of all the aspects of nature, asserting that all of these secondary qualities. as well as the primary qualities simply enter into mind and depart from it without being affected by the contact. The other trend, that of pragmatism, regards cognition as simply a phase of conduct, denying any awareness to immediate experience. It is the relation of mind to body from the standpoint of pragmatism that I wish to consider.
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Two pragmatic doctrines have definite bearing on the relation of mind and body. These are (a) that the so-called percept in immediate experience is the object, there being no mental state of awareness answering to the object, and (b) that reflection, including cognition and thought, is a phase of conduct within which conflicts between reactions are met by reorganization of the environment and of the tendencies within the organism to respond to it-the validity of the reorganization, and therefore of the object of reflection, being tested by the success of the reconstruction. It follows from these doctrines that in immediate experience there is no mind, in the sense of reflection, the relation that answers to that between mind and body being that between a social animal and its environment.
This relation will lie between things in the environment (or the environment as a whole of which the things are constituent parts) and the individual as another thing. The dividing-line between the environment and the individual in immediate experience is functional. The individual acts, and that upon which and within which he acts is the environment. The hair that he has cut, the tooth that he has pulled, and the foot that he bathes belong to the environment. The organism that effects these processes is the individual. The contents of the things in the environment are their colors, sounds, tactual qualities, odors, and tastes, their beauty or ugliness, their meanings and values, including characters of past and anticipated experience that go to make up the object. The content of the individual in immediate experience seems to shrink to the efforts and strains involved in attention, postures, and movements of the body, with such boundaries as actual or anticipated contacts define. This statement has reference to what are called physical things, as distinguished from social things. The social environment is a narrower one than the physical environment. The physical environment also includes the social environment, that is, social things are also physical things. But persons, or selves, are things in our immediate experience, and the individual in that social environment of things is himself a person, or, better, a
(362) self. The same distinction between things in the environment and the individual holds here that holds between the physical things and the physical individual in whose environment they lie. This amounts to saying that social objects, or persons, are immediately present in experience, or, in customary psychological language, are perceived. The social individual or self exists in his efforts and tensions in social conduct toward the social individuals that have all the characters that belong to them as neighbors, members of families, or other groups. They have besides these characters those of physical beings. The boundaries of social things and of the individual as a social being are determined by contacts in social conduct. Social conduct presupposes a group of animals whose life-processes are determined in considerable part by the actions and the consequences of these actions on the part of one another. These actions called out by the peculiar characters, postures, and gestures of the different members of the group constitute social conduct. It is important to note that in immediate experience the environment and the things within it extend both spatially and temporally, that things are therefore at distances from one another, that they change qualitatively and move, and that these relations of extension in immediate experience are always with reference to the here and the now of the individual that answers to the particular environment. Things exist immediately at a distance, and they occur immediately before and after one another. Spatiotemporal intervals are judged and criticized in reflective experience, but, in order that they may be judged, they must exist immediately and in the organization centered about the here and now of the individual implied in the experience.
The other characters of things besides those of extension, those in psychological terminology termed sensuous, and the meanings and other values, are subject also to the organization of environment and individual. In immediate experience the import of this determining nature of the relation between environment and the individual appears in the differences in all the foregoing fields which results from the different positions,
(363) sensings and acts of attention of the individual. The individual, opens his eyes, changes his position, and directs his attention, so that the characters of things may become different. Furthermore, the meanings and other values of things are relative to
the particular act in which in immediate experience the individual exists as an agent. The action of the individual in all the fields of so-called experience is selective. The contents of things in immediate experience are in a considerable degree dependent upon the individual as acting, as an agent. In this sense the environment of the individual is relative to the individual. If an individual sees two objects where there should be one, or the reflection of an object in a mirror, or a circular object as an ellipse, or a straight stick in water as bent, he may turn his head, or move to another position, or move the object so as to see the object as it is; but he feels no inclination to place the double objects, the reflection, the elliptical coin, or the bent stick, in himself, except in so far as the inclination may be logical, owing to a reflective philosophical attitude. In immediate experience these so-called illusory aspects of things are in the environment. In most cases they are adequate stimuli to normal conduct. They are so genuinely in the environment that, if we undertake for doctrinal reasons to place them in a consciousness, we find that they take the whole environment with them. We are not disturbed by having two distinguishable visual images occupy the same place at the same time in inadequately focused binocular vision. The afterimage, or aftervision, of a bright object may be placed at different places in the environment, and we may thus vary its dimensions. We are in the same domain of perceptual experience when we recognize the content of memory imagery in the object. We see on the printed page words, light from which never reaches the retina. We see the face of an acquaintance, only to discover that a so-called image has filled out the indistinct vision of another person. We see things hard and cold and smooth and succulent, and there are sensuous contents present that bear the same immediate relation to the individual as do those of vision. When we recall the tenuous im-
(364) -ages of a past vivid experience, these images are out there somewhere in the environment, in no way disturbing the vision of things we say to be actually there. In dreams such images occupy the whole field of immediate experience, and in hallucinations they compete with other experiences for what we call reality.
C. THE ACT IN RELAT10N TO DISTANCE AND CONTACT EXPERIENCES
Our primary adjustment to an environment lies in the act which determines the relation between the individual and the environment. An act is an ongoing event that consists of stimulation and response and the results of the response. Back of these lie the attitudes and impulses of the individual which are responsible for his sensitiveness to the particular stimulus and for the adequacy of the response. It is the adequacy of the response which in immediate experience determines the reality of the stimulation. Things are not real as seen or heard or smelled; they are real as actually or potentially experienced through contact.
In immediate experience events are present in a temporal as well as a spatial thickness. The psychological term for this temporal thickness is the specious present, and this involves an actual duration of things in which, to use Whitehead's expression, an event extends over other events that make it up. A reflective analysis of this duration breaks it up into instants without temporal thickness that have no relation except that of succession. A group of such instantaneous events can have no inner durational connection with one another, such as that of whole and parts, since each event has ceased to exist before the next arises. We replace in reflection the actual wholeness of durational experience in two ways: either by a thought-conspectus of the succession of instantaneous events or by the conception of a persistent force which finds expression in the events. The conspectus reveals uniformities of change, which become the scientific content of the concept of force. The reflective judgments
(365) that belong to such a scientific procedure are on a different logical level from judgments of perception, though the term "judgment" in immediate experience is probably a misnomer. There is, however, in immediate experience, with its actual durational connection of stimulation and response, a fulfilment of the former by the latter that I take to be the basis for the reflective judgments of reality. The response is functionally the reality of the stimulation; the end of the act the reality of its beginning. The stimulation implies the response. The fundamental expression of this is found in the location of the reality of the distance experience in contact experience. The completion of any act called out by a distant object would, if all its tendencies were carried out, eventuate in contact objects.
The contacts which are the realities of distant experience are, however, the means for further action, either in the completion of fundamental biologic acts, such as that of eating, or in the mediation of more complex acts. Contacts in immediate experience are in themselves never ultimates. If we set them up in a mechanical science as the reality of the world, we must remember that in conduct they always look beyond themselves to further conduct.
Recurring to the values of the different elements in the perceptual object, it is to be noted that distance stimulation has in it the promise of later experience that justifies or validates it. This later actual or imaged experience is of the same nature as that of the contacts which we are immediately experiencing, in which the distance characters disappear. The world of reality that we assume to be existing at any one moment of experience is, then, of a contact character --things that could be handled, or the divisions of these contact objects which science sets up as its hypotheses. In so far as our judgments of perceptions and those of reflection place these contact contents in the objects, they have necessarily removed their distance characters, for the contact character implies that the distance has been surmounted and that the result of the act has substituted the realities of contact for the beginnings of the act. It is true that we
(366) can generally see what we feel, but the sight is only an invitation to manipulation. However, this vision of the object that we at the same time manipulate is of fundamental importance. It is the maximum vision toward which all visions of the object expand as it approaches us or we approach it, and is that visual content which does not perceptibly vary in the perceptual field. Even this visual content varies as we permit the eyes to approach or withdraw from the object, but within the field of manipulation the import of these variations disappears because we can always identify the seen thing with the dimensions of the felt thing. Having made this identification, we proceed to use the richer content of visual experience to identify the same object in different positions, and the finer discriminations of vision for the higher degrees of exactness in measurement. The processes of so-called exact measurement are indirect and depend upon the probabilities of variation, but back of them lies the assumption of an application in actual or imagined contact experience of some sort of a unit measure. This contact extensional experience remains the same wherever we are, while visual experience varies with every change of position. The uniform space of a measureable world is, therefore, a contact space.
It is further evident that such a uniform space must also be a timeless space, for we assume the completion of all the acts which perception implies, and, if they are all completed, the time which their normal carrying-out would involve must be annihilated. A uniform space can be obtained only by the sacrifice of time. But time does exist. What has been termed "judgment of perception" (the implication that a contact experience does or will validate the distance stimulation) does not in immediate experience remove the distance-say, visual -- character of the object from the realm of existence, or even substitute the contact character, which validates it, for the distance content. The colored, sounding, odorous world is there. The individual, apart from the effort involved in reaction, seems to be represented by the "here" and the "now," and by the control which he exercises over the contents of the environment through
(367) selective attention. This orientation and selective attention are, however, but phases of the act. There is nothing in this nature of the individual which suggests transferring any of these characters of an environment which is there at a distance to the individual. The fact that what is felt is not, as felt, colored or sounding, does not suggest that color and sound are not in the object as it exists at a distance, though the ultimate contact experience is the justification for the action which they call out for their being, in other words, distant objects. Nor is there any problem in the relation of the distant stimulations to the individual in immediate experience. What is later interpreted as an epistemological problem appears here simply in getting adequate stimulation and in hesitancy to response in the presence of different stimuli. Nor is there any suggestion in the success or failure of the act that what are later termed the logical and affective values of the objects can be transferred to the individual. There is at this stage in conduct no problem of mind and body. So far as the self exists at this stage, it is a part of the environment like the body, or it is the active individual in social responses.
D. THE FUNCTION OF THE SELF IN CONDUCT
The essential condition for the appearance of what has been conceived of as mind is that the individual in acting with reference to the environment should, as part of that action, be acting with reference to himself, so that his action would include himself as an object. This does not mean that the individual should simply act with reference to parts of his organism, even when that action is social, but it does mean that the whole action toward the object upon which attention is centered includes, as a part of this action a reaction toward the individual himself. If this is attained, the self as an object becomes a part of the acting individual, i.e., the individual has attained what is called self-consciousness-- a self-consciousness that accompanies his conduct, or may accompany a portion of his conduct.
There are two things to point out here: one is the function of
(368) making the individual himself an object in his own act; the other is the mechanism of this conduct.
The making of an individual an object to himself is not found in immediate experience. In immediate experience the introduction of one's self into the act is hampering and embarrassing. In conduct within which readjustment must take place before the act is completed, there is at least a place for such an involution as that of making one's self an object in acting with reference to the environment. Given such a situation, in which because of conflict, readjustment must take place, the function of making one's self an object seems to lie entirely in so pointing out to one's self the different characters of things that a readjustment of responses will become possible. Control in intelligent conduct takes place through attentive selection of stimulations. There is no direct control of the response. Control is secured through the finding and emphasizing of the appropriate stimuli in their relation to one another. Selective attention may be given to different features of the objective field, without the individual pointing them out to himself. Under these conditions a readjustment may take place without what we term "reflection." This is the solution of problems by trial and error.
In the trial-and-error solution studied in the experimentation on animals, we find that a number of trials with failure are necessary to inhibit the wrong response, while the intelligent human individual does not simply repeat the response that has failed. In the experience of the lower animal the memory image of the failure does not arise to inhibit the response until repeated failures have taken place. The human individual in indicating himself as carrying out an act provides a suitable content for the attachment of the memory image. This is to be recognized not only in experimentation upon animals but also in our own conduct. There is a considerable field of our conduct where we also proceed by trial and error. This is true in the acquirement of a great deal of our manual skill in games, or in the control of such mechanisms as the bicycle or musical instruments. We gain the control after repeated failures which we can correct only grad-
(369) -ually. What appears upon analysis of this conduct is that the individual cannot indicate to himself exactly what he is doing, or, what is the same thing, exactly to what stimulus he is responding. He does not present himself as responding to a specific stimulus in a definite fashion. The identification of the self with a certain act serves to isolate it and render it definite, so that the results of past experience enter into it to control its further expression. In the situation noted above, in which one acquires manual skill by the trial-and-error process, what is experienced is that one cannot tell what one has done that has been responsible for one's failure. The individual is unable to identify himself with a specific response. He repeats the same inept motions until gradually he finds himself adjusting himself to the field of stimulation, responding to characters that he has not noted, but still without being able to identify himself with a specific response or to determine just what it is to which he responds in his successful acts. But where stimulus and response define each other clearly, as in leaping over a ditch, or in pounding with a hammer, there he can indicate to himself the stimulus, the self to which it is indicated appearing in the tendency to leap or strike. If the tendency is for the moment inhibited, the results of past experience arise, and he finds himself noting to himself elements in the object which were present in the earlier experience, at the same time identifying himself with the varied response, or tendency to respond, which these characters call out, saying, "I cannot jump it," or "The hammer is out of my reach." The effect of this is not simply to leave the individual in an attitude of defeat over against a forbidding environment as a whole, but with a specific object (an unjumpable ditch, a hammer out of reach) while the rest of the environment is freed from this atmosphere of defeat and is ready to call out other reactions. There is a further result, namely, that the ongoing process of advance to a distant goal (such as driving the nail) is present as a self that is seeking to advance in some other way than by direct progress, that is seeking to drive
(370) the nail by some other method than by an immediate seizing of the hammer.
The general result is that other tendencies to action are freed to sensitize us to additional stimulations. The psychological elements of an object are a definite stimulation answering to a definite response plus the results of past experience of the response. The object is a collapsed act. It is when these results of past experience have attached themselves to the stimulations that we find a field of objects within which we can act intelligently. The conflict, together with its inhibition, breaks up these objects, and it is not until new objects have arisen that intelligent conduct can proceed. What is essential to this reconstruction is such an analysis of a complex act that that which has checked the whole act may be identified with the specific part of the act to which it belongs, for it is only when a definite tendency to respond answers to a stimulation that it becomes a distinct part of the field of perception and can assimilate the memory images of past experience. To isolate a part of a complex act is, then, to expose the field to the independent sensitizing influence of the other tendencies which were so organized that they acted under the conditions set by the whole act. The immediate function of the appearance of the self in experience is that of analyzing the complex response, in the face of conflict, so that a new field of objects may appear together with a reconstructed act. This takes place through the identification of the self with the defeated element of the act, and then with the entire act, deprived of this element, seeking to reorganize itself out of elements freed from the former organization, sensitizing us to characters in the field of stimulation to which we would otherwise not have responded, that is, which would not otherwise have existed as objects for us in the environment.
The further function of the self as an object in the field of action is to be found in the attention to the universal character of the object in the environment, and its abstraction by means of symbols of communication in the form of what is called ideas.
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Whatever endures in the midst of the passing of events (whether this be some sensuous content that persists while other characters come and go, or a structure of the thing that admits of change of content, or an aesthetic, logical, or ethical content that persists while other characters shift) is in so far universal, for it is a character of which there are a number of instances and of which there might be an indefinite number. Within the structure of the thing these universals may also disappear while the structure remains, since there may be what are called more inclusive and less inclusive universals. It is these persistent characters which can be indicated to others or to one's self, for only that which persists can be indicated. That which is indicated must last while attention is held upon it and directed toward it. Such an indication of a character by a specific social gesture, generally vocal, with the tendency to respond to the character pointed out, is what is called an idea that answers to the universal content. It is the attitude of response to these universal characters which answers to them in the individual. The responses are universal because they may be called out by any number of different stimuli and so answer to that universal character in the object which calls them out. In the experience of individuals they are the criteria by which we identify the universal characters in things. Whatever one tends to sit down in is a chair. Whatever one places in a scale of colors is a certain blue. We identify the universal contents in things by presenting ourselves as responding to them, and we call these responses aroused by the significant symbols of social gestures, or language, the meanings of things. It is because we can summon ourselves, as organizations of responses, into the field of experience by means of these symbols, that we are able to isolate these meanings and so further the. reorganization of our responses in a plan of action.
The mechanism of bringing the self as an object into the field of experience implies two things: first, that the individual indicates things and their characters to others, and second, that the stimulus of which he makes use is one to which he tends to
(372) respond in the same fashion as that in which the others respond. Such stimuli are found chiefly among the vocal gestures, which thus become language symbols, significant symbols. Back of this developed process of speech lies that long process in infancy of stimulating one's self by one's own social conduct and attitudes to play the parts which one's conduct and attitudes call out in those about one. It is a process which has passed under the misnomer of imitation. It leads through play to the building-up of these responses in the roles of others into a self or personality. In this part of the self the child indicates to himself what he wants and can discuss with himself things and actions from the varied standpoints which these different responses represent. Thus in the experience of the individual a self has arisen to serve the functions of reflectively attaching to things and their characters the results of past experience and of indicating and isolating the meanings of things.
E. THE NATURE OF MENTAL PROCESSES
It is evident that the mental processes are just those phases of conduct into which the self as an object has come to deepen and render significant our analysis and to make possible the rational solution of our problems. So far as the significant symbols which the individual uses are stimuli to his own responses, these processes lie in the individual. So far as things, characters, and imagery are indicated, the processes extend beyond the individual. The locus of mind is not in the individual. Mental processes are fragments of the complex conduct of the individual in and on his environment. The objects and contents of the objects are as much in the environment in the reflective processes as in those of immediate experience. What has taken place in the reflective phase of human experience is this. the actual dependence of the environment upon the individual, which is not present in immediate experience but which has always existed in the relations of living forms to their environments, has, through the appearance in experience of the self as an object, passed into the control which the individual exercises over the
(373) environment. We have referred to two phases of this control. One of these is the appearance of new objects through the reference of failures in response to the specific stimulations that call out the response. The double reference of past experiences of the act to the objects and to the self puts at the disposal of the individual results of responses in their relation to what called them out but do not, or may not, immediately appear. We express this in the term "recollection," meaning by this that we summon and control memory imagery, both in the analysis of the object and the complex response to the object, through its place in the self extending into the past from the "specious present." The second phase is found in the appearance of responses which had belonged to complex acts, but which in the inhibition of the act can answer to the new objects appearing in the environment. These responses constitute, as we have seen, the meaning of these objects when they have been indicated by the significant symbols of social conduct and are called ideas. It will be seen that, while an indefinite number of instances of objects in nature appear in our immediate experience, new objects arise in reflective experience only through the interaction of the individual and the environment by means of the mediation of the self as an object.
There is another phase of mental processes which has been barely indicated above, but which calls for further reference. This is the unity of the analyzed or diversified field of the environment, and of the responses that inhibition has set free from the organization of the earlier act. What is preserved is the wider organization of the life-process within which the inhibited act lay. One way of expressing this is to say that the environment exists for the individual as that within which the more inclusive act must go on, as containing the conditions for any solution of the problem which arises out of the conflict. The unity of the environment is that of organization of the conditions for the solution of the problem. The problem itself exists within the larger inclusive activity which must go on in some different form, under some reorganization of the parts of the
(374) act in the presence of the conditions which appear in the environment. This unity appears in experience through and in the self as an object. In an experience within which individual and environment mutually determine each other, the unity of the environment and of its constituent objects as well as that of the individual arises out of the activity of the individual. In so far as the individual acts with himself as an object, this organization of the environment and its objects in terms of the conditions of the solution of the problem, and the larger act within which the inhibited process lies, make the problem itself an object for the individual. In customary phraseology we say the individual knows what he is trying to do and what are the conditions of his doing it.
A further question arises in regard to this reflexive intelligent conduct concerning the fashion in which the self as an object becomes a part of the individual. In the play period of little children this reflexive act has not yet taken place. The child in one role addresses himself naively in another role. These roles are not at first organized into a personality, the child simply passing from the one into the other as the conduct in one calls out a response in the other. In more consecutive play, especially of two or more children, the tendency to take other parts comes in to stimulate and control the execution of the part assumed. Thus a child will stop and applaud himself and then resume his performance. If the play becomes a consecutive whole, the tendency to take all the parts at the appropriate moments is present in the attitude of the individual child, controlling his entire conduct. The child becomes a generalized actor-manager, directing, applauding, and criticizing his own roles as well as those of others.
It is the attainment of this degree of personality which marks the passage from the period of play to that of games. The nature of the game is such that every act in the game is determined and qualified by all the other acts. This is expressed by the rules of the game, and implies in each individual a generalized player that is present in every part that is taken. What takes place in this dramatic fashion in children's plays and games evi-
(375) -dently goes on in the formation of the child's personality in the life of the family, and of other groups in which the child finds
himself. Through assuming the roles of others, to which he has stimulated himself by his own conduct, he is organizing them into generalized attitudes and becomes a member of the family, of the school, and of his set. I have already Indicated the capital part which language plays in this process, owing to the fact that in the use of the vocal gesture the individual tends to arouse in himself the same response as that which he calls out in others. In a word, the self as an object becomes a part of the individual through his having assumed the generalized attitude of a member of the group to which that self belongs, a group that widens until it takes in all rational individuals, that is, all individuals who could indicate to one another universal characters and objects in co-operative activity. In being an object to himself in this role of a citizen of the universe of discourse, a person indicates to himself both the conditions of the solution of his problem and the various inhibited responses that are seeking reorganization, and associates with these responses the results which they have had in past conduct, thus giving rise to the new objects which provide the field for the new act.
If we ask what actually takes place in the experience of an individual during mental activity, that is, in reflection in the presence of a conflict and its consequent problem, we discover the following situation. The individual in the attitude of a member of a rational group indicates the various characters of the new objects that have arisen as the result of the conflict, and the consequent inhibition of the complex response that was going on, by means of significant symbols. These indications are gestures-mainly vocal gestures-which call attention to these characters in things. It is important to note that the reason these characters excite attention is that there are reactions which they call out. The reactions are those which are in some sense set free by the inhibition of the original act within which they were organized. The original form in which these gestures appear is in the adjustment of the individual to the responses which are ready to take place. In social forms these gestures
(376) have become valuable stimulations to other members of the group, such as a herd or a brood of chickens, and have been preserved. In the human individual that tends to take the part of the other, they have the double significance of directing his own attention and of exciting the attitude of the other. In the attitude of the other the individual not only tends to respond to the stimulations but to indicate the response which he tends to make by another significant symbol. There are now two roles, at least, involved in this conversation, that of the generalized actor whose attitude represents an adjustment to all the alternative responses which fall within the larger act within which the conflict has arisen, and that of the specialized actor who tends to carry out the response to the stimulation upon which the attention is directed. To recur to the illustration already used, the inhibition of the act of continued walking toward the distant goal sets free the possible responses to stimuli to jump the ditch, or to skirt or bridge it. But they all lie within a generalized process of locomotion, and this generalized process in some sense presents conditions for the selection of one alternative rather than another, or for some combination of them. The specialized actor indicates the response, say, of skirting the ditch, but it is indicated to the generalized actor who represents its relation to reaching the goal. Passing from one role to the other, through the use of the significant symbols, the individual relates this specific response as well as others to the including act. Eventually the specific response or set of such responses falls into place within the larger act, and the individual proceeds.
F. IMAGES, IDEAS, AND SECONDARY QUALITIES
In the mental processes there are two sets of objects which have in especial degree seemed to demand a mind to act as a habitat. One of these sets is that of imagery. The mind becomes
The mansion of all beauteous forms;
The memory is as a dwelling place
Of all sweet sounds and harmonies.
(377) The other set of objects is that of ideas. The very nature of the idea indicates that in a very real sense it is not in the world. One's undertaking is that of fashioning the world so that it shall conform to an idea that Is not there realized, and that recon structed world is an environment that is confined, at least for the time being, to the individual whose idea it is. This holds also of imagery. As content we assume that imagery belongs to an environment that is confined to the individual In question. In that sense it is a private environment. It is a piece of the world into which no one else can enter.
It is, however, an unwarranted assumption that such contents are so substantially different from objects in the common world of experience that they cannot belong to it. As already indicated, a content of imagery is normally found in the objects of the world of immediate experience, and the ideas as contents appear in perceived things as their natures. It is not some substantial character that differentiates images and ideas from the world about; it is their accessibility. In dreams and hallucinations this inaccessibility as a character has for a time disappeared, and the contents are no longer the stuff that dreams are made of. Nor is inaccessibility confined to images and ideas. Any part of the organism except in so far as it is located in distance experience as a part of the environment -- I refer to such objects as an aching tooth or a pleased palate -- is also inaccessible to all except the individual whose organism it is. The inaccessibility in this latter case is plainly mechanical. If the world at large had nervous access to the tooth such as is accorded to the suffering individual, it would be an aching tooth to all. I see no reason to assume that, if a similar neural access to cerebral tracts were possible, we might not share with others identical memory-imagery. This view that the nervous system pro vides private access to certain realities has already been suggested by Bergson, in his Matière et mémoire. But Bergson did not conceive of the image as the physiological stimulus, as the table is conceived when we speak of it as the physiological stimulus in the experience of the table as an object. He thought of
(378) the brain as a selective agent for picking out the images which are needed in our conduct, but he gave no clear picture of the mechanism by which this was accomplished. The best picture of this which a physiological psychology has been able to present has been that of the re-establishment of a sensuous experience when the nervous centers which were involved in this experience are centrally excited. It is possible to assimilate such a description to the experiences which arise when a sense organ is excited by an agency which is not the proper stimulus of that sense organ, e.g., the experience of light and color when the eve is pressed by the finger or excited by an electric shock. One can assume that the central stimulation travels from the cerebral disturbance to the sense organ and then back to the sensory tract and that, in some fashion, past experience leads to an excitement that approaches that of the original excitement of the end organ, or that the similarity of the image to the original perception is due to the re-excitement of the same central elements, or to both. Such accounts, however, do not place the memoryimage that is perceived in that relation to the physiological organism which the original object held. The table stands in what is termed a causal relation to the central excitement which is considered the condition of the experience of perception. The memory-image stands in no such relation; it would rather be regarded as the effect of the excitement than as its cause.
We must, however, remember that the table which we regard as the cause of the perception is not the table that is perceived. The congeries of hypothetical physical particles to which we must retreat in our causal statement of distance experience can have none of the qualities which they have in our experience of them and, if we -issume that perception of color arises because of the central excitement induced by these congeries of physical particles reflecting ether waves which do not in any way resemble color, we are also at liberty to assume that extensional experiences, both spatial and temporal, together with that of the effective occupancy of space, which arise when the nerve endings of tactile, joint surfaces, and muscles have been excited,
(379) are also quite unlike the actual object that has been thought of as responsible for the perception. That we have not felt the necessity of regarding the physical particles, which in their combination are the stimuli of contact experience, as unlike the matter of our immediate experience is due to the fact, already referred to, that the continued subdivision of this matter does not deprive it of its extensional nature, while these subdivisions in the physical theories of color, sound, odor, and temperature inevitably deprive the elements of objects of these very characters. I have also pointed out that contact experience assumes a priority of value because it furnishes the criteria of the validity of the distance stimulation and because contact experiences are assumed to be identical in their extensional character for all individuals, while distance experiences vary with the different positions of different individuals. A third important point, which I wish to repeat, is that the causal interpretation of perception in physical theory conceives of the distant object as made up of elements of contact experience, that is, of what belongs to the result of the act, and so eliminates the time which would be required for the accomplishment of the act, i.e., this interpretation denies that temporal distance has any part in the reality of what is perceived, while spatial extension is regarded as of the essence of this reality. In other words, this interpretation implies that the reality of what is perceived has its existence in a timeless space.
It is possible and highly important to recognize that what is distant from us has the same spatial characters-say, contact values-which it would have if we were in contact with it. It is, however, palpably impossible to say that what is distant from us can have the same temporal characters as that which is in contact with us, otherwise it would not be distant. The distance experience of things is of events that are not there when the experience is ours. Distance experience always implies some sort of a temporal process taking place between the distant object and the organism. If in imagination we place ourselves in the object at the moment in which we have vision of it, or sound
(380) from it, what we find there is not color or sound but particles in motion. If we still assert that the sound was at that spot, or the color in existence at the moment at which we experienced it, it is nevertheless not the sound or color which we experienced; and, if we still assert that there was nevertheless in existence the sound or color of the fraction of the moment before, that color or sound itself implied some eye or ear sufficiently at a distance from it to be at the other end of a temporal process. It is, therefore, entirely logical that in the timeless space which physical science sets up as the goal of its exact determinations the socalled secondary qualities of things should be replaced by physical particles presented in terms of contact experience. To reach the thing that is absolutely contemporaneous with our experience, we have to state it in terms of the sort of experience which we have of what is in immediate contact with us.
Thus we conceive of a world made up of particles which are minute pieces of the matter of contact experience, which have effective occupation of space, inertia, and force-things that are of such a nature that they can all exist at a moment of experience, but not of such a nature that their experience implies a temporal process. It is only such a world that can exist at a moment. It can still be asserted that the color is there as an experience at the moment in question, but it is there as a color located perhaps vaguely "somewhere," since even the sound or odor is vaguely "out there" and is not in its nature at the point of immediate experience. As an experience it is not temporally of a sort permitting location in the timeless space of the physical particle. If now we note the experiencing at the timeless moment, we find that we also have to do this in terms of neural processes.
The color, sound, odor, or temperature is out there somewhere at a distance, however vaguely located. It is spatially distant but also temporally distant. If we undertake to cancel that temporal distance by imaginatively and conceptually placing ourselves in the colored or sounding body, we can only do this by substituting for these distance characters the contact characters
(381) of immediate experience, a process by which we annihilate time and reach a timeless space, or space at a moment. And, if now we seize the present moment of experiencing the distance character and undertake to locate the color in the momentary experiencing of the individual that is absolutely contemporaneous with the contact experience of the individual, we are doing two things: we are stating the distance from the standpoint of the individual and we are stating it in such form that it cannot be the character of the object. We can place ourselves in the distant object at the moment in which we are experiencing the object as a distant object. There its contact value will be that which we are having now in our contacts with chairs, clothes, and other objects. If, however, we identify the color and sound with it as contemporaneous contact existence, we have given it distance characters, and it is no longer there. What we call do is to state what must be its material character in order that in the present position of the individual it has the distance characters of color and sound, and in this statement we must also include the individual. We build up a physical theory of sensuous experience in terms of a matter which can still have contact values of effective occupation of space, inertia, and force, but which cannot have distance values, the so-called secondary qualities.
A dualistic philosophy, of which Descartes' is the prototype, sets up a spaceless time as the counterpart of a timeless space. In the experiencing of the individual there are events which succeed one another in a nonmaterial soul, that is, in a soul or consciousness which has no contact characters. In this soul or consciousness there can logically be only experiencings. The contents experienced are spatial, even those of imagery, and cannot be placed in the spaceless time.
G. THE FUNCTIONAL THEORY OF REFLECTION
Holding the problem within the field of perceptual experience, the method of reaching a spaceless time is the converse of that of reaching a timeless space. The latter calls for the elimination
(382) of the temporal or process phase of experience, leaving an extended world of the moment or the "now." The former calls for the elimination of the world as it spreads out three-dimensionally in the durationless moment, leaving the durational or ongoing phase of experience abstracted from the world in which it goes on. It is evident that this is a single abstraction and that, as we plant ourselves in one phase or the other, we provide ourselves with the content of the opposite conception. Within the momentary world of an ideal physical science we imply the conspectus of these moments, the durational spread; while in the world of pure happening, i.e., in a world of obtruding events, whose sole condition is that they are not what is, that it is only the unexpected that happens, we imply the spread of what does happen in a duration so indefinitely reduced in extent that the differences that are essential to happening may be neglected. It is also evident that it is an abstraction that approaches an ideal limit that is never reached. The world at a moment must include vector elements and the contents of momentum and force that involve motion; pure duration must find its jumpingoff place in an extended world that is and its arrival in a continually emerging world that still belongs to the world that is. The terminus ad quem of this abstraction is evidently not a timeless space, or a spaceless time, but a situation in which the spatial or temporal content may be safely neglected in conduct. In other words, the abstraction is functional in conduct and belongs to the experience of individuals in whose conduct there appears a world of relatively permanent objects, those in which the character of duration is negligible, and a corresponding durational process that may, for this reason, be independent of its content, and hence be the duration within which the novel arises. Such individuals would be those within whose experience problems of conduct arise, the conditions for the solution of which are fixed, while the solution itself is not given in the relatively permanent conditions.
This situation arises, as indicated above, when the individual through the development of social conduct has reached the
(383) point of indicating to himself the results of past action present in tendencies to response. The association of successful and unsuccessful reactions with the present tendencies to react lying within the larger act constitutes a self that is another object in the field of conduct. In the mutual inhibition of the reactions, the so-called memory-images of the results of past reaction and the characters of things are referred to the responses themselves as too high, too broad, too sour, etc., thus constituting an individual built up out of inhibited tendencies to react, memoryimages of the results of the reactions, and the indication by significant symbols of the characters of the things that answer both to the stimuli to respond and to the result of the response. Over against this individual lies an environment of objects that has lost the organization of the field of conduct and can reach a new organization only when a rearrangement of the responses and a corresponding rearrangement of the characters of things makes conduct again possible in a new field of conduct. While this is taking place, the old environment is there as the sum of the conditions of the new plan of action and the new field of conduct. It is there as a duration, but only as a moment to which past and possible future is referred. In the effort to refer past experience and future response to as permanent an environment as possible, the duration with its changes is reduced to the lowest terms. We look for the permanent conditions of possible action, and these can only be found in a world as it exists in a moment.
On the other side lies the examination and reorganization of the elements of the environment, a reorganization that is determined by the formation of the responses into a new composite act. In this duration past and possible futures lie over against a relatively timeless environment. The temporal spread is in terms of past occurrences and anticipated reactions, which are abstracted from an environment that is a relatively changeless situation.
It is important to recognize that the same contents are here that were in the world of immediate experience, when the char-
(384) -acters of things, the results of past experience, and their values for the individual were entirely absorbed in the objects, and the individual was reduced to the mere effort of action and the here and now of orientation. There is a new object, the self, to whose experience is now referred the memory-images and the tendencies to respond. This new object has arisen through the mechanism of social conduct, but its contents were in the world of immediate experience. They have been analyzed out of the inhibition of the act and are referred to the self by the mechanism of social conduct. After successful reorganization they pass again into the world of things, and the self is reduced to the effort of conduct and to the point of spatial and temporal departure for the act.
In the reflective phase the attempt to reduce the environment to the world at a moment shows itself not only in the reduction of duration to its lowest terms but also in the translation of the distance values of things, which are essentially durational or temporal in their nature, into contact values. The thing at a distance appears not as a colored or sounding object that calls out an extended reaction to reach it but as it would feel to a hand that was there at the moment, that is, as having the values of our own momentary contact experience, those of the effective occupation of space, of inertia, and force. What is involved here is not simply the filling-out of the distance stimulation of color or sound by the past experience of contact values, tactile volume, and resistance. Such objects are those of immediate experience, and the contact values of these objects are stamped with the same future date as that which belongs to color and sound. The body will be hard when we reach it. It is the reverse of this which occupies reflective experience: the distant object is now made up of resistant volumes whose structure is the statement of the present reality of color, sound, and other distant futures. As only contact objects in the experience of the individual have the temporal value of the now, the distant object can be so dated only in so far as the individual in reflection is there as well as here. This placing of one's self outside the individual in tak-
(385) -ing the attitude of reacting upon the self arises, as has been indicated, first in social conduct. The basis for it is found in the fact that certain social stimuli, or gestures, tend to arouse in the individual the same response within himself that they arouse in the other to whom they are addressed. Later the individual finds himself giving expression to this tendency and, in thus addressing himself, becomes a self. In his social conduct he has become an object, or other, to himself. For a primitive nature, whether in the child or in the earlier groups, all objects are social, in the sense that they call out social responses, especially when the interest in the objects is vivid. These social objects are but vaguely defined in large part, but the social attitude has served the function of arousing in the individual the contact response of that which later appears as the merely physical thing, when the individual reacts to it. The response is at first that of a something that helps or hinders. When the abstraction of the physical thing has taken place, the response is that of adjustment to the manipulation of the individual and especially that of resistance. It is this imaginal experience of resistance that carries with it the temporal character of the now and serves to bring the whole field of physical objects into a timeless space.
It should be noted that the space of this timeless space is still that of distance experience and normally visual. For this is the extension of our conduct and is subject to far finer discrimination than tactual extension. It is this that gives to our extension its unlimited nature. One can rest in a contact experience without going out from it, but in so far as one, wherever one places one's self, finds one's self in a visual field, one is invited to move to other points.
H. CONCERNING GREEK FORMULATIONS OF THE PROBLEM OF MIND
In early Greek speculation interest gathered about the characters of contact experience-the wet arid the dry, the hot and the cold, the heavy and light. The profounder analysis of the
(386) Eleatics came back to the resistant solid extension, incapable of change, i.e., timeless by its very nature.
Speusippus and Democritus rescued change by insisting on the distance, or visual, character of space, and by confining change to motion of particles, and the effects of this motion to contacts of the atomic particles of matter. With this statement appeared the still present problem of the distance values of things, or the secondary qualities. For Democritus they were the effect upon a soul, made up of fire or spherical atoms, brought about by distant objects. The discovery of Socrates and his followers that all the characters of things, which conflict has analyzed out, can be referred to by significant symbols, lifted them into the realm of dialectic, or conversation-into the agora, or into the inner agora of thought. The fact that these significant symbols referred to universal constants in things and that these characters of things appeared as inner attitudes of response in the self, presented what seemed to be a new realm of being into which idealistic philosophies transferred the ultimate reality of the environment from the world of perception. The effect of this was to transfer the reference in experience from the stimulus in the act to its promised result, over from the perceptual world as an appearance to a world of logical forms, or natures, or ideas. The perceptual world, that of appearance, was characterized by its particular instances, which only shared the universals or only imperfectly expressed them, and by its change, in which particular things decayed and perished and so lost their forms or universal characters. The forms or ideas were universal, permanent, and changeless. Thus the ancient world, blurring the distinction sharply presented by Democritus, abstracted the world of immediate experience from that which the significant symbol indicated in social converse.
The effect of this metaphysical attitude was almost to reverse the reference of immediate experience. In immediate experience the reality of the distance experience is found in contact experience. From the standpoint of idealistic metaphysics pieces of inert resistant matter which have merely the possibility of form
(387) were at the farthest remove from the universal types that were located in the world beyond the heavens and constituted the reality of the world of sensuous appearance.
The grounds for this shift of reference can be found, I think, in the character of the problems that occupied ancient reflection. These problems were almost entirely social problems, at first those of politics and then those of individual conductthose of morals. The first effect of this was enormously to emphasize the social technique of reflection, in other words, dialectic and logic, and to hypostatize those universal characters to which the significant symbols refer. The second effect was to place the universal characters of things outside experience because ancient reflection was frankly unable to find solutions for their social problems either in politics or in morals. They could devise neither an order of society nor a manner of life for the common man which within immediate experience could meet the social problems that confronted him. Social justice, and the union of social solidarity with individual initiative and responsibility, remained practically unattainable, and therefore as fixed conditions of the solution of the social problem were idealized as existences transcending immediate experience. The same transcendent existence was logically assigned to other universal characters of things which were arrived at by the same process of analysis and indication.
A further effect of blurring the distinction which Democritus had brought out between physical things in a contact experience and distant characters which should find their reality in this contact experience was to leave all so-called sensuous characters of things in the world of appearance-all equally, from the logical standpoint, referring to universal forms or natures in a supersensuous world of ideas. '['he effect of this was to divide the individual on the logical level, leaving the relatively uninteresting processes of sense perception in the world of sensuous appearance, and to identify mind with the so-called supersensuous reason, the power of indicating the universals and relating them to one another. While this was a process, it did not take
(389) place in a time, i.e., in a measured duration. The unitary soul that passed over into modern thought by way of Augustine's writings was an artifact of Christian metaphysics, not the outcome of epistemological reflection.
I. THE NATURE OF UNIVERSALITY AND NECESSITY
There are indicated in these attitudes of ancient thought two orientations of mind, one toward the physical organism as a part of the whole mechanism of the universe, and the other toward a structure of universal values in social individuals and in things which can be indicated by the organized significant symbols of intercourse of the social individuals-toward what may be called a universe of discourse. By the term "universal" is meant that the language symbol as a stimulus can be indifferently addressed to any one of the members of the social group and calls out a response which is adequate to the carrying-out of the social act. Such a symbol, then, fastens upon some character of the individual or thing which calls out a response in any individual that is competent to carry out the whole social act. In so far as the act is not carried out, the attention remains centered upon the symbols and the characters they indicate as presenting the conditions for an unrealized experience. If the assumption of the reality of this experience in another world, or in a supersensuous experience, becomes important for conduct, they are set up as abstract existences, as a world of ideas. It is important to note the two types of existence indicated here. On the one hand, we have the character of the thing which shares in so far the existence of the thing. Thus things are numerable, identical within durations, and have a unity of organization. In indicating the things as existent and their characters we indicate the existence of the characters. In so fir as the so-called laws of arithmetic present the technique of quantitative analysis and recombination, these characters have not only the reality of the analyzed things but also the anticipatory reality of the things that will arise. As our experience is that of acts which imply responses which the stimuli call out,
(389) this anticipatory reality is of final importance. The final attainment of it in the response is called experimental evidence or proof. There is the other reality, also anticipatory but given or necessary, of the conditions to which the sort of response that is anticipated must submit. Kant called the reality of the necessary conditions of a possible experience "transcendental."
Necessity in our terms means nothing but the given or accepted conditions of the act that is being carried out, especially the widely co-operative acts with which science is concerned. When the act is estopped, its fulfilment perhaps indefinitely deferred but still eagerly sought, these necessary conditions present the only form of the reality of the desired result and in that sense are said to have a necessary existence. Thus we speak of the necessary justice of the return of purloined goods. They are called ideal existences in both senses of the term "ideal": they are ideal as abstractions from things, i.e., as characters of things that are indicated by significant symbols, and ideal as having a promised reality in the result which the inhibited act seeks. The identification of these two values of the term "ideal" is the essential characteristic of idealistic philosophies.
The body of conditions (thus abstracted from the environment) of complex social acts, on the one hand, inadequately carried out or completely frustrated, or, on the other hand, serving as the competent technique for the solution of problems which arise in the conduct of society, constitute either the subject matter of metaphysics or the apparatus of science, while the controlled process of indicating these characters to others or to one's self in outer or inner conversation constitutes dialectic or logic. The definitions given above of logical universality and of necessity call for development at one point. Universality is the attitude of addressing a significant symbol as a stimulus indifferently to any one of an indefinite group to bring about the response that the continuation of the act calls for, where that group includes the individual himself as an other. Necessity is the attitude of acceptance of a reflective situation or elements in a situation as conditions for the possible carrying-out of the
(390) act involved, where the individual, whose attitude it is, is himself one of the group within whose co-operative activity the reflective problem has arisen. The point that calls for development is the membership of the individual in the indefinite group within whose activity the problem has arisen or may arise, and to whose members conversation is or may be addressed.
This membership has already been defined in terms of the game which succeeds play in the development of personality in the child. While in mere play the child addresses himself as an other in the role of an other, mere play does not determine or definitely define the role assumed. In the game, any part which the child assumes is determined and defined by the other parts in the game which the child imaginatively assumes. The organization of all the attitudes of the different parts in the game as determining and defining his own part or that of another constitutes membership in the group that plays the game. 1 have also referred to it as the attitude of the generalized other in the group. Whether this group is of a restricted or indefinite number depends upon the character of the co-operative activity that is going on. In the logical game the number of participants is indefinite, provided they are willing to "follow the argument" in Socratic phrase, i.e., if they are willing to accept the conditions of the solution of the problem which its statement carries with it in the group activity. This is the import of semper et ubique. It should perhaps be added that universality in the object, or the universal character in the object, implies that an indefinite number of objects or characters of objects may serve to set free a certain impulse; and that universality in the individual implies the attitude of response that answers indifferently to an indefinite number of objects or characters in objects! it is the -,kiccc,5qfxll completion of the act, no matter which stimulus calls out the response, that identifies the objects or their characters as the same, except for numerical difference. Actual identity in content is merely a "route of approximation" by which we reach differences that are negligible for the carrying-out of the act.
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The orientation of reflection in the individual toward the universe of discourse (i.e., the significant symbols, and the universal objects and characters of objects, together with the attitudes of response which such objects and characters indicate attitudes organized in a co-operative act of an indefinite group of which the individual is himself a member) emphasizes the functional nature of mind.
From the standpoint of reflection, the content of mind for the individual who is unprejudiced by doctrine varies greatly. If he is thinking, i.e., is discussing a matter with himself, he would probably place all the significant symbols in his mind, but things and their characters, universal as well as particular, would lie outside. Again, his own attitudes of response, in so far as he referred to them by significant symbols, would be placed in his mind as ideas. Uncertain future situations, especially when there are alternative possibilities (and these influence one's conduct), would be regarded as mental; while stepping into another room to speak to someone concerning whose presence there was no question would hardly appear as mental. The falling into a new organization of an environment that had been analyzed by conflict and inhibition might lie entirely outside of mind, but suggestions of different ways of acting would certainly be regarded as the individual's ideas. Imagery that enters into perceptual objects would not be mental, but all results of recollection would be so classified, as well as the contents of constructive imagination; while unquestioned past events, especially when recent, would be related as external events and the memory-images of them would appear as extensions of the -specious present."
It is not the character of the content that renders it mental in the reflective process, for even what are called motor-images, or attitudes, appear as the content of outside objects as being hard and offering resistance. From the point of view of reflection two attributes seem to belong to contents of mind: one is that the individual indicates the content to himself, by signifi-
(392) -cant symbols, and so becomes responsible for the organization of it and its function in carrying on the act; the other is that the content shall be restricted to the experience of the individual. This latter characteristic, however, is highly ambiguous and misleading in its implications. Certainly outside things common to the experience of others enter into our thinking, nor are memory-images more properly contents of thought than sticks or stones or planetary bodies. The ground for this commonly received criterion of the content of mind is to be found rather in the other orientation of mind.
The mere indication of universals and the recognition of particulars as stimuli that answer to the universals in our responses-the relation called that of implication; the indication of wider responses as including more specified responses-the relation of subsumption; the indication of a specified response as involving the wider response-the relation of inherence: all these may take place in the conversation of an individual with others or in the conversation of the individual with himself. The only advantage that accrues to this conversation with the self-to thought-is that involved in the self appearing in the character of a member of the whole logical group and so speaking for the whole group. The attitude of membership gives logical universality to the indication, but this advantage of indicating logical universality accrues to the individual not in his particularity as a personality but in his generalized character as a member of the logical group. The contents gain nothing through their appearance in the particular conversation of the individual with himself, though he as a personality may gain social prestige and other social advantages through being the one who does the thinking. The whole tendency of the indication of universals and their relations is to abstract from the personal incidents of thinking-the so-called psychological characters of thinking-and to emphasize the universal character of the objects and characters indicated, and the universal response of the group.
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J. HISTORICAL ASPECTS OF THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM
Mind as it appeared in the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle was as impersonal as possible. A content which was restricted to the mind of a specific self would have lost its logical universality. The relation of the body to such a mind would be that of providing the specific occasion for the universal thought, or that of resisting and impeding the operation of thought by its impulses and passions. Mind would have a preferential position in the world of Universals, being able to identify or recognize them, while the body would represent only certain things whose natures could be recognized.
It is of interest for this orientation of mind in the ancient world that, although the results of a great amount of careful observation are recorded, especially in Aristotle's Parts of Animals there is never any reference to the individual who has observed, or to the conditions under which the observation was carried out. The results of these observations are given in the form of universals. Aristotle's theory of observation given in the Preface to the Parts of Animals is that it consists in finding the instances which express the universal with which the observation is undertaken. The precondition for successful observation is that one already has the "final cause" before he can recognize the object. On the other hand, in medicine, where the Greek physicians were in the field of empirical science, their philosophical attitude was generally skeptical. Already in the time of Aristotle, Greek astronomy, which made large use of observation and hypothesis, had separated from philosophy; nor did the later and most productive period of this science and its mathematics play back at all into philosophic thought as did that of the earlier period into Plato's thought. The insistent problem of post-Aristotelian thought was social and moral, but the social problem was for the ancient world essentially insoluble and gave rise only to the metaphysics which hypostatized the ideas in terms of which the problem was stated in the experience of individuals. Philosophy for the individual became largely a propaedeutic for entrance upon a life of abstract think-
(394) ing withdrawn from active commerce with the world-the life of ataraxia or the ecstatic moments of neo-Platonism or neo-Pythagoreanism. The particular spatial and temporal experiences of the individual played no part in philosophy except as providing the terminus a quo of thinking, and the resistances of impulse and passion which reason was to crush and surmount. I am aware that exception could be taken to this statement by the student of the Stoic psychology of self-control and the Epicurean analysis of pleasures, but I am confident that it does justice to the trend of thought that moved away from the consideration of mind in its particular bodily conditions.
Medieval thought started with the unitary soul of Christian theology, and, while it was divided in a tripartite fashion that harked back to Plato and Aristotle, it was necessary to ascribe to the soul in its entirety the spirituality which these philosophers had ascribed only to the reason and the rational forms and ideas. It was out of the necessity of carrying the spiritual nature of the reason into the passional and impulsive life of the individual that the conception of consciousness as the dominant character of the mind arose. By translating all the experiences of the self into terms of knowledge, they assumed the spirituality that attached to the reason as the organ of knowledge par excellence. Identifying knowledge with all forms of experience brought its own problems, those of epistemology. Thus we find an uncritical representationalism in so early a scholastic as John of Salisbury, while, on the other hand, we find the universal forms appearing as mental constructs or ideas in Abelard's conceptualism. It must not be forgotten that reflection in the medieval world was regarded as primarily occupied with theology and the philosophy which was oriented entirely with reference to theology, and that theology was an attempt to state the theory of a drama that was enacted almost entirely in the soul. The reflective part of the drama of salvation or damnation took place within the mind. It was there that sin damned the soul, or grace saved it. The external acts of the cult
(395) of penitence proceeded from acceptance of authoritative direction from an inspired source. The acts of the individual himself began and ended in the mind or soul. Thought did not extend out into an outer world for its completion, nor did it commence with external problems, at least in the case of the problems about which men anxiously thought. The world was an indifferent stage thrown up ad hoc to incarnate and house souls already condemned at birth but still able, by taking thought, to accept redeeming grace. Thus a nominalistic philosophy which was psychologically oriented furnished the mind in duplicate both with things and with ideas, while theology regarded the most essential conduct of the soul as taking place within this mental world, in petto.
The outcome of this situation was to place authentic cognitive processes, involving both particular experiences of things and ideas or universals, within the mind, and to set up as the speculative question of the Renaissance and later ages that of the relation of these objects of sense and of thought within consciousness to the objects extending beyond or lying outside consciousness to which they referred. While ancient thought recognized an act of knowledge as authentic only as it terminated in a universal that lay outside the particular experience of the individual, modern thought was compelled to recognize the particular experiences of individuals lying in consciousness as objects of knowledge, thus opening the door to modern empiricism, with its attendant modern skepticism. Ancient skepticism denied the possibility of knowledge if one started with Protagoras from the particular experience of the individual. Modern skepticism, having an object of knowledge in the consciousness of the individual, denied its implied reference to objects beyond consciousness. Thus while ancient skepticism left the skeptic with the comfortable judgment that knowledge was impossible and the objects of thought illusory, the modern skeptic finds himself within a world of states of consciousness whose existence is given in consciousness, and whose contents
(396) continually lead to wider knowledge. Modern skepticism does not lead to the calm and quiet of ataraxia, the goal of all ancient post-Aristotelian philosophies up to the final mystical period.
For ancient thought all knowledge was of universals, attained by a rational insight, for which the bodily processes provided at most only the occasion. The nature of knowledge was not bound up with the relations of mind and body but was regarded as the direct insight of the reason into the nature of things. The relation of body and mind belonged to the cosmological description of things and occupied no critical position in the theory of knowledge. It excited in that metaphysical age no insistent interest but found its place in the logical distinction between evanescent particulars and eternal unitary ideas or forms.
The modern world from its beginnings had accepted, so far as it reflected at all, the plan of salvation presented by Augustine in his philosophy of history as the controlling conception of its cosmology. This cosmology found the raison d'être of the world centered in the cognitive and volitional attitudes of individual souls-souls whose experience was most fundamentally bound up with their bodies. Men believed to be saved. Knowledge in its most authoritative form was conditioned by sensuous, emotional, and volitional attitudes. The vast undertaking of medieval scholasticism was the adaptation of a theology that was an outgrowth of decadent Greek philosophy, shot through with neo-Platonic motifs and an accepted Aristotelian metaphysics, to this cosmology centering in particular individual experiences. The Summa theologica of Thomas Aquinas was the ultimate achievement of this undertaking, but it failed to harmonize the incompatible attitudes of a knowledge which was the insight of an impersonal reason, and the immediate cognitive experiences of souls immeshed in bodies and a physical world, seeking beliefs from motives that grew out of this relation of soul and body. This incompatibility asserted itself at various points throughout the whole history of scholasticism, but it became the dominant motive of speculation at the time of the Renaissance.
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It was of the first importance for the development of Renaissance philosophy that human endeavor, starting from the experience of the individual, his personal problems and achievements, stretched out toward secular goals that challenged the speculative reason. The ambitions of monarchs of the rising national states, together with their policies and those of their religious and political opponents, gave birth to a political theorizing that found expression in a Machiavelli, a Spinoza, or a Hobbes. All started not from a given state eternally ordered by its own nature or by God but from the individuals who make it up. This same political speculation reinforced by mechanical and social discoveries and inventions produced such utopias as those of More and Bacon. Discoveries and inventions led to new theories of the heavens and the earth and demanded a new physical and mathematical science. Men found themselves in vast adventures that started from their own individual experiences and reached out through their own imaginations to hypothetical presentations of different orders and structures and natures of things from those which had been authoritatively presented and accepted. When these hypothetical presentations agreed with later experience, when they had been experimentally substantiated, the new order and the new objects took the place of the old, and the hypothesis was considered as having been a true representation of reality, while the former presentation appeared as an erroneous representation. This forward look toward a different environment presented in hypothesis, and the backward look toward the discredited presentations, turned the world of experience into a phenomenal world of mental representations. Science found two points of contact between this representational world and the world of reality: first, in the individual's observation of the fact that discredited the accepted presentation of the world, for its very disagreement with the mental presentation seemed to place it solidly in a world of reality outside that representation, while the experimental agreement of the hypothesis seemed to be a passage from mental presentation to an outer reality; and, second, in unassailed
(398) mathematical, mechanical, and logical principles and laws that seemed to hold both in the representational world and in the world of fact and experiment. The facts and the ordered structure of things presented the conditions for the solution of the problems with which science was occupied and seemed, therefore, to lie outside the mental field within which the problem had arisen. Empiricism in philosophy started with the facts as both mental and objective, or physical, but, having placed the secondary qualities of things entirely in the mind as a result of the physical explanation of them, could find no ground for not placing the primary qualities also entirely in mind, and finally set about the task of reducing the order and structure of things to those of ideas or mental states, for representations being no longer things became states of the mind or of consciousness. Rationalism, on the other hand, starting with the given and accepted order of the mind and of the world set up a mundus intelligibilis of which representations were inadequate and faulty presentations.
Science, standing firmly upon its facts of observation and experimentation and upon the ordered structure which its problems did not invade, remained indifferent to the skepticism that arose out of empiricism and the idealism that sprang from rationalism. Mind, for science, was the agent which in observation detected the fact and distinguished it from the representation, and in imagination and thought constructed the hypothesis and brought it to experimental test. It was further the habitat of the contents of the world which could not find a place in the extended world of the instant to which science reduced its universe for the sake of exact measurement, i.e., the habitat of the so-called secondary qualities, and also of the discarded and erroneous representations which scientific research left behind it.
The actual incidence of skepticism and of idealism was upon the conception of the world as a given determined moral and social order to which man and society should conform, a conception which the modern world inherited from the Old World and from the theology of Christendom. While science is a social
(399) undertaking both because of the social nature of the scientist's mind and because of the social character of the scientist's universe of discourse within which investigation takes place, the conception of a determined social and moral order has no place in the technique and method of research science. The so-called conflict of science and religion finds its ground, in so far as such an opposition exists, in the complete indifference of scientific method to the idea of a fixed moral and social order, which has been an essential part of theological, and in considerable degree of social, theory. The ideal (if not actual) necessity of such an order has been a presupposition of such theory. It never appears, however, as a condition for the solution of a scientific problem. The soul or mind that must assure itself of God, immortality, and the freedom of the will is a different mind from that which is occupied with a working solution for the immediate problem that confronts it. The first achieves its goal by taking reality up into itself, while the second is only a phase in the development of intelligent experience.
We find, then, two different orientations of speculation concerning mind. The first is toward the soul of a Christian theology. This soul was regarded as passional, impulsive, and volitional but, in all its attitudes, as believing or disbelieving, i.e., cognitional. This latter characteristic has passed over into that of consciousness. It was essential to the eschatology of the church doctrine that this soul should not be mortal. It could not die with the body. What gave to its affective and conative experiences an immaterial character was an assumed continual reference of them to a self and a continual reference of them to standards of right and wrong. An individual that not only loved and hated and willed but also was conscious that he did so (i.e., could refer these attitudes to himself by means of significant symbols and approve or disapprove of them as actions of himself), not only isolated, and in so far abstracted, these universal characters in the attitudes and actions but also identified them in this abstract form with the self as a social object. The physical experiences have also the "idea" or consciousness of the ex-
(400) -perience bound up with them. They became immaterial in the same sense as the abstract universals of ancient thought were immaterial, in so far as having an experience and being conscious of the experience were made one and the same thing. It was the identification of the experience with this conscious or cognitive reference which gave the whole soul its immateriality. The cognitive reference, i.e., the reference of a character to other selves and to the individual's self in the same act, instead of remaining a phase of behavior became a stuff, a spiritual or conscious stuff. This stuff was, of course, accepted as the nature of the individual as a social object, i.e., of the self, but it is necessary to distinguish between the individual and this endowment of consciousness, or what has been called the subjectivity of modern consciousness. The self as a social object may simply be there, as other social objects are there. The structure of such a self may be objective, i.e., a being determined by his legal, family, religious, and other relations-the Latin persona. Whatever the immediate experiences of impulse and desire, satisfaction or distress, of such an individual might be in determining his values, what he was as a person was fixed by the social structure that was there. He was the political animal of Aristotle. The peculiar individual experiences of the person became rights and duties, goods and evils, prerogatives, authority, crime, punishment, office, etc., only as they appeared in the structure of a personage arising out of the society that made him a social being. What was peculiar to the individual could take on the form of the universal, could become an object of knowledge, only as it took its place in the person which society had constituted. A cognitive character, then, attached to the peculiar experiences of the individual only as they ceased to be peculiar in their nature.
The implications of the theological doctrine of the church involved another social order which transcended human society as it existed in the world, and the evidences of this social order were found in the relations of the individual to a deity that stood above and outside the existing social order. While this
(401) other order was presented in a complex ecclesiastical structure it was centered about the confessional. The religious drama of a man's life was an inner experience, involving belief which determined the import of the attitude instead of external conduct. From the standpoint of ancient society a man found out what he was from the position and meaning which the social structure gave him. Then he could cognitively assess himself. From the standpoint of the church a man believed in another social order which appeared in his inner relation to God, and on the basis of this social order he assessed his acts, attitudes, and himself, as well as others and the external order of society. His cognitive attitude toward an order of society flowing from his own attitude toward God determined what he was and what was the nature of his own acts and those of others. The religious attitude demanded a credo. The motive in large measure was the seeking for salvation from the wrath to come, and the inner life was predominantly emotional. The credo was not based upon perceptual experiences but largely upon inner feelings. The body was simply the habitat of the soul, not a mechanism of knowing.
I am referring here to the attitude of the naive nonspeculative man. The Scholastic found himself faced with the task of according this attitude with the metaphysics of Aristotle in the form in which it appeared in the Middle Ages, and particularly with the theory of universals developed in the quarrel between the realists and the nominalists. It was the latter who developed the implicit doctrine of consciousness in perception, discovering in sensations the materials of the immediate object of knowledge, which thus became the representation of the real object without, but this did not reflect a reflective problem that grew out of the life of the time. The medieval individual did not set himself and his standards up against the institutions of the community as did the ancient individual at the time of the sophists of Greece. In the religious upheavals culminating in the Reformation he found in his inner religious experiences a basis for an attack upon the authority of the church in its inter-
(402) -pretation of the monuments of Christianity, and in the rise of the national states he found in his adherence to a national state and its monarch a ground for attack upon the political authority of the church; but in neither of these situations did the individual find a ground in his own thought for an attack upon the institutions of church or state as such. The medieval individual in revolt was a heretic, not a skeptic. It was not the implication of an object of perception that was itself made up of states of consciousness that afforded the ground of division between the soul and the body. The determining conception was that of a soul which did not die with the body but awaited its further fortunes in a world to come from which this body had disappeared. It was the immortality of the soul, not the relation of consciousness and a physiological mechanism in perception, that fixed the relations of soul and body. The body was the temporary habitat of the immortal soul.
The problem of the relation of the conscious soul and the material body in perception arose out of the scientific conception of matter which was formulated by the time of the Renaissance. It was the new science of dynamics that brought with it the problem of epistemology. The possibility of analyzing a motion into different velocities, and the development of a mathematical technique by which it became possible to measure a constantly changing velocity, gave in velocities and accelerations in velocity new physical units by which motions could be followed to the limit. Laws of physical change were discovered which gave new meanings to things-the meaning of ordered changes which could take the place of the scholastic universals. With the discovery of the laws of change, it became possible to predict the position of objects. The configuration of any system could be determined at any moment if the analysis of the changes and the structure of things could be carried far enough. The world would become exactly knowable in proportion to the possibility of stating it in terms of extended inert matter in motion. There were two implications of this conception, the first being that the reality of the physical world was what could
(403) be exactly known, i.e., the extended matter endowed with inertia and moving according to the fundamental laws of motion. The rest of our perception of matter must be vague and confused, so far as knowing the reality of it is concerned. The other implication, which developed more slowly, was that the structure of a body in terms of its matter and motion was the sole physical cause of all its other qualities in experience.
Thus there arose out of the physical theories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a physical world of inert matter in motion in space and time. This world included our own bodies. What there was in experience in addition to such objects must be placed in the conscious soul. If our perception is knowledge of this physical world, knowledge is radically bifurcated. What reveals extended matter in motion is clear cognition of the physical world. In so far as it is experience of color, sound, taste, odor, and temperature, it is knowledge of the soul affected through the physical body by such a material world. Physical and psychological theories were occupied in explaining these other experiences, i.e., in giving the conditions in terms of extended matter in motion of the states of consciousness which we call "sensations."
K. REJECTION OF TRADITIONALLY PROPOSED CRITERIA OF MENTALITY
Gathering together the various elements which have been regarded as belonging to mind, we note first those particular contents and characters which express the determining influence which the organism exercises upon its environment. A living organism has only such an environment as it can respond to in so far as it receives stimulations from it. Its environment, therefore, is bounded by the capacity of the organism to be affected by it through its various sense processes. Furthermore, the objects that exist in that environment are determined by the form of the responses of the organism. The determining responses in the case of the human organism are those of contact, especially those of manipulation. As we have seen, the object is that of
(404) which we do or would obtain contact experience if we carried out the reactions which the distance stimuli tend to call out, i.e., actually approached it and manipulated it. These different characters which, on account of our sensitiveness, act as stimuli (the so-called sensuous characters of things), and which, together with the selected and organized contact experiences (whether imaged or directly experienced), go to make up the perceptual object, have as the result of various analyses been located in mind. As we have seen, however, there is nothing in these contents which justify us in placing them in mind, since all of them are found also in things which we distinguish from mind. It is not the contents that are mental but the functional process which carries over its mental character to its contents.
Again, what has been termed "intelligence" has been made a character of mind. This intelligence finds its simplest expression in the appropriateness of the response of a living form to the environment in the carrying-out of its living process. Such intelligence as this belongs not only to animal but also to vegetable forms. As a rule, we confine the term "intelligence" to the modification of the response and the selection of the stimulus as the result of past experience, in meeting the difficulties that arise in the life-process. As there is evidence of this adjustment in unicellular forms, and even in certain reactions of plants, and as it is found through ranges of our own conduct that are not usually considered mental, it is hardly appropriate to consider intelligence as such mental.
Again, the self as a social object has been identified with mind. As we have seen, the social object, or person, arises in social conduct. In immediate experience social objects may exist for us without our including in our conduct toward them any implication of mind. An illustration would be found in our movements among persons in a crowd. In such conduct, so far as this conduct involved no reflection, the individual would not locate his own social reactions in his mind. Social objects and social actions do not as such involve mind.
Again, experiences which by their nature can belong only to
(405) a single individual, and which are private in this sense (such as pleasurable and painful experiences, experiences of parts of one's organism, emotional experiences and especially imagery), have been classed as mental. As we have seen, our attitude toward such objects does not necessarily place them in mind. It is not their inaccessibility to others that renders them mental.
Again, consciousness has been identified with mind, or at least mind has been considered as a form of consciousness even if all consciousness has not been placed in the category of mind. The term as we have seen is highly ambiguous. By some, all experience has been considered conscious; such a view would probably exclude from experience the conduct of plants, as well as that of all animal forms when under anesthetics, and most automatisms. It is necessary to define "experience" first if we are to distinguish experience from consciousness, or to speak of conscious and unconscious experience, or even if we are to deny the existence of such a thing as unconscious experience. "Experience," in the sense in which it is used in this paper, refers to that portion of the life-process of any form which includes the actions of the form as a whole with reference to an environment. It does not include, for example, the processes of circulation of the blood, most of respiration, or most of the digestive and assimilative processes. The term carries another implication: the conduct is regarded from the standpoint of the form rather than from the standpoint of the environment. Thus "experience" implies that one is giving a life-history of the form in question, that the statement of the environment would be in terms of objects such as would exist for the form in question, and that the statement of distances and characters of things in the environment would be in terms of the particular sensitivities and reactions of that form rather than any other. This definition of the field of experience is most easily attained when the individual himself indicates these characters in the objects, indicates them to others, but more especially indicates them to himself. That is, it is easier to get the standpoint from the point of view of the individual if he gives it than if it is given by an-
(406) other, but his giving it is not that which is implied in experience. What is implied in experience is that things and events are stated in terms of their values for the individual as revealed in his conduct-and values here do not imply what would ordinarily be called consciousness of the values. This is an intelligible conception of experience, and it enables us to define consciousness, in its various significations, without assuming that consciousness has already been involved in experience.
L. CONSCIOUSNESS AND PHYSICAL ANALYSIS
A common procedure in isolating consciousness is that of stating both environment and form in purely physical terms, i.e., in terms of the physical sciences. Such a statement covers and expresses the whole process and all the things involved in the process, and yet it is a statement in terms of things and changes which do not themselves appear in the experience in question. What is left behind in making this statement may on this analysis be referred to as conscious experience. Thus a statement of the different sense characters in terms of the physical and chemical elements that in their motions are the conditions of these sense characters appearing in the experience is inevitably a statement in terms that are not those of the experience itself. This holds of all our experiences, even those of extension and effective occupation of space, but with this difference: we cannot give a statement of the conditions for the experience of extension and the occupation of space except in terms of extended things, while our statement of the distance experiences (those experiences of things that act as stimuli to getting contact experience of them) is not of things with the characters we are explaining. What we do in these explanations is to present the contact condition of things that act from a distance upon us. The statement of experience in terms of the physical sciences is, then, rather a statement of the whole situation of environment and organism in terms of possible contact experience, in the timeless space of science. This inevitably wipes out distance characters if the statement involves our
(407) placing ourselves in the objects that are responsible for the distance experiences. However, in so far as we extend this analysis to the organism itself, we have taken away the conditions under which even extension and the occupation of space appear, although the statement is in terms of extended matter. Here we have reached a statement of the whole situation in terms which are those of the underlying conditions of experience itself. Although it is a statement into which we can translate everything, including the organism itself, an essential character of experience has gone out of it, and this something is what from this standpoint is considered as consciousness.
Now as the elements which we reach in this analysis are but smaller portions of the extended matter of our experience, portions which can retain in our imagination of them the characters of being extended and occupying space, it is not the absence of the qualities of experience which would lead us to consider what is left out of the statement (i.e., distance characters and the actual contact characters) as consciousness in distinction from what is unconscious. For we are using our contact experience of matter in the presentation of the universe at an instant in the exact sciences. Because we have placed the secondary qualities in consciousness when science has found no place for them in the world of the physical sciences, we are not justified in identifying consciousness with what is left after the scientific analysis, unless we are ready to deny consciousness to our experience of extension and the occupation of space. It is possible for the rationalistic scientist and psychologist to say that this ultimate element of matter in terms of which we state both the environment and the organism is not necessarily conceived in terms of our experience and the effective occupation of space. They may say that what these elements- are is outside of possible experience and that the visual and tactual images by means of which we present these elements are merely surrogates for things in themselves that we assume to exist, without ascribing to them the actual characters with which they appear in our imagination. We can say certain things about the char-
(408) -acters of these things in themselves which are implied in our experience, but this statement does not involve these characters having the form with which we inevitably clothe them in our imagination, since our imagination cannot itself transcend experience. We can simply, from this standpoint, say that the order and arrangement of these things in themselves are assumed to be what appears as the order and arrangement of the imaged elements without, however, ascribing to these things in themselves the experienced characters without which imagination is impossible. From this standpoint, matter and space and time can be left entirely outside of experience as far as their ultimate reality is concerned, apart from the assumption that their order and arrangement corresponds to that found in experience. Even the existence of this correspondence in regard to order and arrangement would remain only a working hypothesis. In this case "consciousness" could be made to cover all experience, but experience would then be an appearance which implies a world of things in themselves that is to be reached only by assumptions that can never be demonstrably justified.
This is a position that has been variously presented both by the empiricist and the rationalist (both by Hume and by Kant) for metaphysical reasons which need not concern us, though it is interesting to note that both empirical and rationalistic positions have received a certain scientific indorsement. It is the import of the psychological analysis that requires our attention. If the statement we must make of the situation out of which color arises in experience is made the pattern of a psychological analysis, it is difficult to see why the statement of the parallel situation under which contact experience arises should not carry the same conclusion as that which seems to follow upon the psychological analysis of color experience. The conclusion in the case of color is that the molecular structure that is responsible for the absorption and reflection of light waves cannot have any likeness to the actual color that arises in experience. The reason for the conclusion lies in the fact that we substitute on the surface of the object something entirely different from the color,
(409) but which stands for the color. In the same fashion, in the case of the experience within which contact arises, we substitute for the surface and resistance of a body the action upon nerve endings of irritations that cannot themselves be substituted for an extended surface or for a resistant volume. The difference lies in the fact that, when our physical analysis subdivides the body in the account of the physical happening involved in these experiences and thus reaches that form of the body which constitutes its reality for physical science, these congregations of physical particles could not by definition have any color, while they still have extension and effective occupation of space as their essential characters. It may be impossible to identify the experience of an extended and resistant surface with the irritations of the nerve endings on the surface of the skin, but the irritants and the nerve endings can be still stated in extensional terms, while it is impossible to state the molecular collocation which reflects a ray of light in terms of color. Now we may go back to the situation which seems to be the nature of the extended body and say that, since it is by experiences which cannot be identical with the supposed structure of the body that we reach an experience of extension, therefore this picture which we make in imagination of the extended inner structure of matter must itself be a mere appearance which cannot be like the things in themselves of which it is a representative.
While this is an arguable proposition in regard to the experience of extension, it would not interest the scientist in the least, although he at once recognizes that the color or sound experience is one which cannot possibly be of particles which are themselves colored or sounding. The outcome of this is that the scientist conceives of the world as consisting of physical particles, or combinations of them, with such characters as would belong to them if the individual, in whose experience they appear, were in contact with all of them at the same moment. In such a world there would be no secondary qualities. It would be a world of physical particles possessing mass, inertia, motion, and force. So far as these particles exist in a visual space, the
(410) distant stimuli would serve to enable the individual to present himself as identifying himself with each particle, being inside it, i.e., realizing the particle as effectively occupying space and exerting force, which would place it in relation with all other particles. Motion would appear as the integration of the infinitesimal motions, or tendencies to motion, considered as vector quantities. Thus the reality of the motions would be found not in the visual paths but in the inner realization of the tendencies within the particle to move.
In so far as the scientist presents this picture of the reality of the world, he has abstracted from all the content of the world beyond what can appear in these contact experiences, including not only the secondary qualities but also all the meanings and values except those involved in the physical laws or uniformities of these particles and their motions. It would be all that from which he has abstracted that would be placed in consciousness, for, though it is abstracted from, it is not nonexistent. Now all these characters from which this scientific abstraction is made are characters that invite reactions which will take the individual to the object and give him the experiences of contact. The line between these types of characters runs along a functional line of cleavage, not a metaphysical one. As before stated, if the individual puts himself into the contact experience implied in the molecular structure of a colored surface, he recognizes at once that this reality could not be the color that the surface has mediated, but he would not feel either that the color lost its reality in the object when it was at a distance or that the difference in the values of the two expressions of the surface was a difference between a noumenal and a phenomenal existence. Rather he would say that in its contact character it could not be colored, while in its distant position it was colored. The fact that the color implied a contact experience, which implication is justified in the later reaction, does not transfer the color to a consciousness, while the contact experience belongs to a reality that in some manner lies outside of consciousness. Nor is there anything in this abstraction of the characters (an abstraction
(411) which makes it Possible for us to present the world as having a momentary reality that is identical in all physical particles at the moment, i.e., that does not arouse a reaction which would take us beyond the moment in expressing its implications) which justifies the location of the reality of the experience in the central nervous system. The central nervous system is a part of a world of the physical things which science has abstracted from our perceptions and cannot be given a preferential position from the standpoint of reality. Its preferential position lies entirely in the relation of the perception to the experience of the individual distinguished from other individuals.
This brings the discussion to another conception of consciousness-as experience from the standpoint of the individual. As we have seen, it is perfectly possible to state experience from the standpoint of the individual without implying what is connoted under the term "consciousness," for we can speak of the experience of the plant or of the amoeba or of our so-called unconscious experience, and such experience may be presented definitely from the standpoint of the individual plant or amoeba or the unconscious organism. What is actually implied in an individual whose nature involves consciousness is that he is one who is an object to himself so that experiences may be referred to himself, and that as a self he may be a recognized object in past and future experience. In other words, this conception of consciousness is identical with self-consciousness.
There seem to be two features of these experiences. There is the self that appears as an object, and then there are situations within which experiences are referred to the self, in which this reference to the self gives to the experience something that it does not otherwise possess. The self as an object is a social object, but it is not necessary to social conduct or to the existence of other social objects. Such objects may be assumed to exist in the experience of lower animals, and in our own experience, without self-consciousness being present. In the experience in which the self appears, the individual finds himself acting as another with reference to himself. He becomes, to use the expres-
(412) -sion already employed, a generalized other, and finds in his experience a group attitude that then enables him to become an object to himself. This expresses what is implied in the etymology of "consciousness" as "an experience with." This connotation comes out especially in connection with the second feature of the experience. We are conscious of things not simply in their existence in the environment of the experience: we mean by the statement of our being conscious of them that we are in the position to refer them to our own experience by this attitude of the generalized other. Not only are the things there but we are able to identify our own attitudes as those of attending to and acting with reference to the things. The basis for the reference to the self is found in the determining character which the organism has in the selection and organization of the environment. This determining relationship is bilateral. The environment determines the organism as fully as the organism determines the environment. The two determinations, however, are of a different character.
M. MECHANISM AND NOVELTY
In general, we consider the determination of the organism by the environment as causal, while we consider the determination of the environment by the organism as selective and, in so far, as constitutive, i.e., the selection of a group of stimuli with reference to our organized activity is responsible for the cuttingout of these elements among physical things and for a certain structure-logical structure-as an object. In our consideration of the environment as determining the organism we reduce both environment and organism to common physical elements when we follow out the causal relations. The effects of the environment upon the organism are mass effects of elements in the one upon elements in the other. Our ability to trace and determine these causal connections is dependent upon our ability to reduce the whole situation of environment and organism to a set of physical particles in motion. In this mechanical whole the operative connections are between the physical elements and their
(413) fields of force. It is only by a summation of these that we can say that the environment, or its objects, affect the organism as an object. The actual reduction of the environment and the organism to such elements is only attained at a certain point, e.g., in the analysis of matter into electrical particles, and electrical effects into fields of force; while in most statements we simply imply such an analysis as an ideal which our scientific method demands for full realization. In this statement of causal necessity we are abstracting from everything in both environment and organism except the physical particles and their motions, as resulting from their fields of force.
When we speak of the determination of the environment by the organism, on the other hand, we imply organisms which have a content which is more than the summation of the physical particles and their motions into which a mechanical science analyzes them. Their living processes are real as processes which reach or fail to reach a consummation. And the objects in the environment have contents which are more than the sum of the motions of physical particles. They are food, enemies, obstacles, protections, etc. These contents always involve the carrying-out of the life-processes of the organisms. In other words, they always involve a future, and a future involves an experience within which that which will happen (is happening in so far as that which is happening always has a bit of the future in it) is uncertain. That which will happen is always different in some respect from what has happened, and this different quality is something that cannot be predicted. In a sense we can predict the future, but what we can predict is always something less than that which happens. Theoretically we can predict to the extent that we can make our -,tatement in mechanical terms, and this implies, as we have seen, that we have abstracted from the determining relation of the organism upon the environment. We can predict the debilitating effect of a disease, but we cannot predict the actual weakness that appears in the experience of the sick person. We can predict that a certain light wave will be experienced as blue, but the actual experience
(414) of blue that supervenes in the experience has a character which is novel and could not be predicted in its ultimate peculiarity. As we look over the past, these peculiarities of the novel as they occurred have lost their interest, and we are interested only in the mechanical conditions that determined their appearance without, to be sure, determining these peculiarities. So that when we predict a series of future events, such as the eclipses that will take place in the coming year, the statement is not in terms of the future in the sense of experience. Our attitude in predicting the eclipses that will take place in the coming year is the same as that in which we determine those that took place in the year in which Thales is reputed to have predicted the eclipse which brought to a stop the battle between the Lydians and the Medes. As this is the attitude in which we make our mechanical statements of the past, we may perhaps say that all predictions are in an implied past. But the expression is ambiguous. Degrees of probability represent degrees of approach to a conceivable mechanical statement. We can conceive of a completely mechanical, though highly abstract, statement of the life-process. In this sense we can say that we have the highest degree of probability of death as the outcome of all life. We can also conceive of a mechanical statement of the whole process of nature, and the question arises whether we can assume that such a conceivable determination of the positions of all physical particles at all times determines in advance what must be the experience of all organisms, even if such a determination does not imply the possible prediction of the actual experiences as they take place.
The question seems to take this form: Is the conception that we form in our scientific research of the mechanical universe as a whole one from which later scientific reconstructions of the universe can be predicted? The answer to this is in the negative. Our conception of the universe as a whole is, of course, never a complete one, but the form that it takes at any one time is one that answers to the view which science holds at that time. This is generalized so far as possible and is made the structure
(415) of the universe so far as that exists in experience. If an essential problem arises in that experience, the implication is definite that the generalization already made is inadequate. Now from such a conception of the universe, one in which an essential problem has arisen, it would be impossible to predict the reconstruction which is required to meet the problem. From the standpoint of the reconstruction that does actually take place in research it is always possible to show the logical necessity by which the new view has arisen out of the old, but such a logical necessity does not obtain from the old view to the new reconstruction. Did the logical necessity that obtains in the new situation exist in the old? The abstraction which we make in our explanation under the new conception, and by which we show the necessity of the advance to the new together with the explanation of the old in terms of the new, is one that can in thought be pushed back into or under the old situation. We can see how men conceived the sun to be going around the earth from the standpoint of our recognition of the hellocentric nature of our system. It would have been impossible to have shown the necessity of an advance from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican theory from the conception men had of the Ptolemaic world. The nature of this new abstraction can sustain both views, both the Ptolemaic and the Copernican, one as explicable and the other as actual; but the views which we hold of the universe at any one time do not carry in them as deducible propositions the new views which will arise in scientific research, though the abstractions that we make with each advance are more comprehensive as they not only meet the new facts but explain the old doctrines.
We have, then, two different attitudes of assurance in the face of the future. The one is represented by perception and the other by thought. In perception the attitude is that of a reaction ready to take place, and in so far as imagery of past experience is there, anticipatory of a certain type of experience, though the result is bound as a new experience to be different from what has occurred. The adjustment of the response to the
(416) sort of experience that is coming expresses this anticipation even where the imagery is but faintly present, or where this imagery is predominantly motor in its character. On the other hand, that which is going to happen must be a constituent part of that which is given and which is relatively unchanging. Novelty and change always appear against a background of that which is old and unchanging. The problem appears in the midst of a world that is itself not problematic. We can present that which is about to happen in terms of what must belong to it if it is to be a part of the world that is. The statement can be only abstract, for what will happen has a content which in some degree is not and cannot be given. In our everyday perceptual experience this abstraction is hardly evident. The pressures we will receive when we place our feet in new places, when our hands grasp things about us, are so slightly different from the actual pressures we are feeling that practically no abstraction is made. As the future grows more distant, or as that which is to occur departs more from the world of experience about us, the abstraction becomes greater. We find that we can give only certain elements of what must take place. If we are to meet a new personage, or one whom we know under entirely new conditions, we find ourselves rehearsing the secure elements of that which is to take place. A certain social structure is given. Certain common standards and interests are involved. A certain common past experience belongs to all concerned. In terms of these given elements we construct a form which the coming interview must take. This structure is an abstraction from the world about us, made in terms of the necessary conditions which the problematic experience ahead must meet. The statement of these conditions is in terms of thought. Theyhave the immediate reality of the given, of the world that is there; and, as the novel experiences that are coming will appear in a world that is relatively unchanged, these conditions determine the form which the new experiences will take. But this form does not determine the content that will arise. The assurance with which we step into the future is that of the adjustment of the life-
(417) -process to its environment which is found in the organism, as it appears in perception, but it is not a prevision of the unique experience that will appear.
There is still a further question beyond the predictability of the future experience, and that is as to its determined character. As we look back over that which has taken place, we can give, or assume that we could give if we had all the elements of the situation, the reasons that determine what has taken place. The only situation within which such a proposition holds is a mechanical one, which becomes perfect only when the world is reduced to physical particles, their velocities, and accelerations. In such a world there is no determination as to what elements are in motion, motion and its characters of velocity and acceleration being relative. Such a world, or such an abstraction from the world, does not define the reality of a living being, for a living being acts. Its reason for movement lies within itself, and in that action, as we have seen, the living being determines its environment. The living being acts to reach a certain result in the future, the realization of its act. In this action it may be said to select its own time system and the space that this involves. It thus determines the world within which it lives. Its determination, however, is a selection, and a creation only in the sense of a reconstruction. Undoubtedly new species arise, and with the new species come new environments, but the new environment is oriented with reference to the new species. The form in some sense selects it. If its life-process is to be completed, the objects in the environment must be constituted with reference to this form. New food, new dangers, new refuges and habitats must appear, though there are the same particles and the -qme forces or fields of force.
The distinction that arises here is between action and abstract motion. Action has reference to a future condition. Motion can be stated with reference to past and present conditions and, in theory, is entirely determined by these. Action carries with it the implication of a certain world of objects within which it can be completed. If it is so completed, it gives us the percep-
(418) -tual assurance of the existence of this world or environment of objects. The acts so completed, or presented as completed, can then be analyzed into motions. Motions are relative changes of position, with varying velocities and accelerations, of physical things, which physical things can be defined or measured with sufficient accuracy so that they can be identified in their different positions. In motion we have abstracted from the here and now of the actor. This determination of the here and now can be made at any point, i.e., any point can be regarded as at rest, and the corresponding changes in position that take place can be stated in terms of the motions of the other objects. The actor determines the point of departure, the terminus a quo, of his actual or possible motion. He sets up there the Cartesian co-ordinates of space. From the zero of that set of co-ordinates action does or may take place. All changes within the environment are stated in terms of distance experience with reference to that set of co-ordinates. These changes are motions, for it is possible, as in the case of the person in the train, to place one's self either in the train moving in a fixed world or in the fixed environment of the interior of the train, while the landscape moves by. It is the actual contact experience, extended by adjustment to surrounding objects, that determines the co-ordinates. In so far as we adjust ourselves to these objects whose positions are changing about us, either by the movement of the eye or actual or possible movements of the body, they have the future value of possible acts. They have the values of possible contacts determining action and promising certain results. The experience depends upon what action is taken, not simply upon past positions and relative present positions. These changes are not merely motions in the abstract sense of the doctrine of relativity.
If the promised experience of action is not attained, and action is inhibited by conflicting tendencies, a reconstruction of the field of conduct may take place, in which new objects answering to a different form of action may arise. It is in this situation that motions in their more abstract sense appear.
(419) The actual line of conduct is not yet determined. It is only the relative position of things with reference to one another, and their relative changes of position with reference to one another, that may be of Interest. This is the situation in so far as we determine the conditions which must obtain for any one of a number of possible acts and so abstract from any specific action. Except in the case of the most extended abstraction, this field of possible activity lies within a world that must condition any alternative course taken. The new objects will still be parts of this bounding, given environment. Our system of co-ordinates is set for this given world that must determine the validity of any hypothesis of action which we adopt. We do not extend the relativity of our attitude to this given unquestioned world. When we present the conditions of possible action within this world, we place ourselves at the imaged completion of the suggested reactions, and all the motions that have taken place have the necessity of their dependence upon earlier positions, velocities, accelerations, and directions; but the reorganization of the problematic part of the environment could not be deduced from these, though it is shot through with necessary conditions which belong to the world as given. In the undetermined future of action a new object, a new terminus ad quem, can arise, the necessity of which cannot be said to exist in the conditions to which it must conform. Even the inclusion of the physical organism, its elements and their motions, within the conditions of the solution of the problem does not determine the future goal of the act, for the physical organism so stated is a part of the abstraction. It also contains necessary conditions, but not the novel objects that may appear. The novel element may be very slight, especially in comparison with the given world within which it appears, but in the experience of the individual it was not involved as a necessity of its past. The statement of the abstract motions could not have included the necessity of the particular act. This amounts to the affirmation that all the novelties of living experience are as novelties essential parts in the universe; the fact that when they arose they were unpre-
(420) -dictable means that in the universe as then existing they were not determinable, nor in the universe as then existing did there exist the conditions that were the sufficient reasons for their appearing.
This statement implies a distinction between a predictable situation that can be deduced from given positions of physical elements and their motions, including their accelerations and directions, and a future concrete situation carrying with it the inevitable novelty which attaches to every event in experience. There seem to be two phases of this novelty. One is found in the difference, shading from almost complete imperceptibility to utter strangeness, between anticipatory imagery of the result of the act and the actual experience. While this difference is unpredictable, we assume that the conditions for it can, after its appearance, be found in the analysis of the situation as it exists. The difference is never of an irrational character, but its rational character does not imply that the conditions of what is novel in it existed in the previous experience, though the structure of that experience can be now assimilated to the structure of the present experience. The other phase of novelty is found in the hypothetical structure of a future situation, when a conflict of the tendencies to action present an essential problem for which a solution is sought. A theoretically complete analysis of the situation as it existed before the problem arose would not involve the reconstruction that takes place, though it would present the conditions to which any such hypothesis must conform. That this hypothetical structure will be found to belong to the future situation depends upon the success of the action it implies, i.e., upon experiment. The hypothetical structure itself , however, is a novelty that could not be deduced from the former experience as it existed.
N. REPLY TO A MECHANISTIC CRITICISM OF NOVELTY
The mechanist denying the second type of novelty would probably give the following account: Our conception of nature as made up of physical particles with certain velocities, ac-
(421) -celerations, and masses does imply that the positions of all particles at all later periods could be deduced from the positions which these particles occupy at any one moment. It would involve simply the substitution of the time variable in the equation of the universe to locate every element at the instant represented by that substitution. Furthermore, the passage from such a conception as that of the Ptolemaic world to a Copernican hypothesis does not represent the actual change from the movement of the sun around the earth to a movement of the earth around the sun but a change in the motions taking place in the central nervous systems of human individuals who study the phenomena of astronomy, and the motions in these central nervous systems fall also within the equation of the universe, so that Copernicus' doctrine could be predicted with the same accuracy by any mind that could grasp this equation as that with which we can predict eclipses. He would insist that this physical structure of the universe exists at all times and, therefore, determines at all moments every situation that can ever arise, however inadequate our grasp of the universe may be. While, then, he would admit novelties as arising in our experience, he would deny that these novelties are found in the physical universe with which his science is occupied. He would say that novelty is a function of two variables, consciousness and error, but that it has no possible place in the world of physical science.
We have seen that this view inevitably wipes out of existence-except in consciousness --all objects except the physical particles, their motions, and the universe as a whole, there being no ground in the relations of these particles for isolating any group of them from the rest of the particles with which they have as genuine relations as those which arc conceived, from the standpoint of our interests, as constituting any particular object. There would be from this mechanical standpoint no place for living forms and their environments as they exist in experience, nor would there be any living process with its implication of a future, the appearance of new forms and their correspond-
(422) ing new objects. All these would be found only in "consciousness," though the physical particles that they imply would have a real existence in the physical world.
The question to be asked is the following: What would be the result for the mechanical conception of the world if we lodge reality in experience as it has been defined, recognize living processes, recognize the appearance of new objects in the environment with the appearance of new forms, find among these objects those that answer to what are called the secondary qualities and affective experience, and recognize the rest of what passes under the term "consciousness" as the social conduct of the individual with reference to himself as an object?
It is evident that as long as we assume the existence of a world of given physical particles in motion with given masses, velocities, accelerations, and directions in a fixed space and time, this world will always constitute a noumenal reality of which experience with its objects (including living forms and their environments) will be but appearances, for we shall always refer experience with its novelties to this physical world as providing its structure and necessary conditions. Now there are two phases of the ordered structure of this physical world to be noted: one includes the measurable spatial and temporal magnitudes which our science can identify and, by carrying them down toward ideal limits, can make highly exact; the other includes the spatial and temporal structures which such magnitudes imply. The measurable magnitudes science could not surrender without committing suicide. What electromagnetic relativity with its specialized mathematical technique has revealed is that the numerical expression of these magnitudes can be retained without assuming a fixed space and time. This seems to imply that there can be selected in experience not only characters and relations but also times and spaces, or families of durations.
The ordered relations of magnitudes could still be retained, and be identified in varying experiences, without positing for them spatial and temporal structures which have to be con-
(423) -ceived of as independent of experience. This does not imply that the space and time, or duration, of experience is a form of that experience which is placed upon the content of experience, as in the Kantian conception, for different families of durations can be thought of as selected in experience in its process.
The question does arise at once of the relation of experience to what we term "nature," for the only conception that we have of experience is of a process which involves a future, i.e., the movement toward a result that will be the completion of the activity. It is the movement toward this problematic future that involves the selection of the time system which determines the spatiotemporal structure of the experience. But experience involves not only a process but an organization of the experience with reference to some individual whose reactions determine the character of the objects, or its environment. We come back, then, to the life-process, and the life-process has a history. In the dark backward abyss of time that we select there was a period in which life could not have existed, and in the forward stretches that we contemplate there may be periods in which no life can exist. What our imagination and thought select and organize is a nature that would be the environment for us which such a history implies. But the particular spatiotemporal structure and its selected objects have only the relative hypothetical reality of our projected experience. What takes the place of the physical elements of nature, with their characters of mass, motion, and direction, are events. As events they pass, but when they pass and where they pass are questions to which intelligible answers can be given only from the standpoint of some experience. As such events they are the most highly abstract of all entities. They are not the ultimate stuff of reality, the noumenal reality of which our experience is an appearance-. They are the final abstractions which we make in comparing experiences which are as diverse as we can conceive them to be.
From the standpoint of relativity there is an indefinite number of time systems and their corresponding spaces in nature. Any element or group of elements may be conceived of as at
(424) rest, and all the rest of the universe may be conceived of as in of as in motion with reference to this point; and the numerical statements of the magnitudes involved in such a statement of the world can be correlated with the numerical statement of the world if any other point is conceived of as at rest while the whole universe is thought of as in motion with reference to this point. If we undertake to make an exact statement of the magnitudes involved in each or all of these formulations of the world, we must carry these magnitudes of mass, extension, and motion by means of abstractive sets to the simplest possible situations, i.e., to the smallest dimensions within our power of computation. We must approach points in space and instants in time. This would bring us to the world at a moment as an ideal limit.
Such a limit can never be reached; on the contrary the actual physical analysis must be in perceptual terms. We can never reach a point, but we will always be dealing with some elements that occupy space, have mass, and are in motion, contents which, as we have seen, are in contact terms, while the universe as a whole within which these elements lie must be presented in distance terms, actually those of vision. But our mathematical theory reduces the physical elements to points whose contents are stated in terms of energy. There seem to be two conflicts between the objects of experience which mathematical technique undertakes to present with the exactness of measurement and this technique itself. One is between the perceptual object that must always have an inner extension and content (that of mass) and the mathematical object that must be a point. The other is between the perceptual world as a whole, which in perceptual terms must be in the form of vision, imaginatively extended indefinitely, and thus involving the time element in vision, and the world at an instant, whose contents, we have seen, must be those of contact, and which cannot give the conspectus of a whole which comes with vision.
This conflict in the concept of the physical particle seems to have appeared in experimental physics in the reduction of matter to particles of electricity. The particle of electricity is essen-
(425) -tially an electrical charge whose energy has not a direct but an inverse ratio to volume. If we take inertia as the measure of mass, the mass of the electrical particle will vary not in a direct but in an inverse ratio to its volume. Thus the electrical particle as the ultimate physical element approaches that of the mathematical ideal. Matter of our perceptual experience has a mass that, given equal densities, varies directly as the quantity, or volume. To assimilate the electrical particle to the physical element of perceptual experience, it would seem to be necessary to conceive of electricity as indefinitely condensable. The fundamental difference of point of view is evident. From the standpoint of perceptual contact experience, inertia as the measure of mass is a property that will vary with the amount or quantity of matter. Constant division will produce smaller and smaller portions of matter, each of which will have its quota of inertia or mass, and which will be proportional to its volume and will approach a point, but the arrival at the point would be coincident with the disappearance of mass and inertia. From the standpoint of the physical particle as a point with a content of energy, we seem to have a viewpoint that is present in the conception of the center of gravity. All the content of inertia and force may be conceived of as lodged in the center of gravity, and we can treat the body as reduced to this point but endowed with the energy which belongs to the entire extended object. The electrical particle seems to approach this conception rather than that of a particle whose mass varies as its quantity. But the electrical particle still has extension and cannot be dealt with simply as a point. It seems to be here that the conflict to which reference has been made appears.
This conflict between the element of matter as a content Whose mass is proportional to its volume and a mathematical point endowed with energy is reflected in the difference between the contact and the visual or distance characters of the perceptual object.
While it is true that a spatial continuum, whether presented in visual or in contact form, is subject to an indefinite division
(426) that never reaches a limit, the ideal limit of the point is given a position in the visual space. The process of crumbling gives us continually smaller particles of what comes to us through contact experience of exteriors and kinaesthetic identification with the mass or force of that whose surfaces we feel, but this content of experience has no ideal limit which would not be an annihilation of the content. The positive identification of the point could not be made by this contact experience, which must always have a content answering to volume, however minute it may be. It is only as it can be retained as a whole in the experience whose spatial relations can be maintained while the subdivisions continue, that a location can be arrived at which is independent of a content. It is this which distance experience; especially in the form of vision, accomplishes. It is possible through an analysis of the two characters of contact experience to hold on to the felt form of the things in the hand or in imagination and to abstract from the content. This amounts to setting up the form as given in the felt surfaces as a distance experience, as occurs in the experience of the congenitally blind. Into this experience enter the experiences of motion as well as those feels of the air and changing temperature and especially variations of sound, where hearing has not been also lost, as in the case of Helen Keller. There is always in a perceptual object, a physical thing, a distance content that is distinguished from what we call the stuff of the thing. This distant whole, whether given in normal vision or in an imaged felt volume, constitutes a continued structural whole whose analysis allows of positions that can give a positive content to the point, which cannot be found in that which effectively occupies the space from within, however far we carry the subdivision.
O. THE MECHANISM OF ROLE-TAKING IN THE APPEARANCE OF THE PHYSICAL OBJECT
In the world at an instant, the ideal situation assumed in exact physical measurement, we thus identify the whole which
(427) appears only in a distance experience with contact experience, including the effective occupation of space.
The effective occupation of space is a content which is to be distinguished both from the distance experience, such as that of vision, and from the tactual experience, i.e., that of so-called passive touch together with the actual kinaesthetic experience of pushing and pressing against solids. The effective occupation of space involves not simply different degrees of effort in reacting to things but also an experience of the resistance which the object itself offers to these efforts. This implies the identification of the individual organism with the object, for resistance which finds its expression in the kinaesthetic experience of effort can appear in the object only in so far as this effort is located in the object. This has been explained by the transfer of the experience of the two hands, or any two opposing efforts of the organism, to the object, and has had a wider statement in Lipps's doctrine of Einfuhlung It is the fact of the transfer that is of importance here. There seems to be evidence of its occurring lower than man, for the dog's worrying of a stick is of the same nature as his worrying of another dog. Whether this is the case or not, the fact is very fundamental in our attitudes toward all physical objects. It seems to be fair to assume that it arises first in the primitive social attitudes with their adaptations to the reactions of others. The basis for the attitude of identifying one's effort with the experience of the thing can be most naturally found in the individual's exciting himself to react as the other acts toward him by his own response, and the mechanism for this is found in social conduct. There the individual, in stimulating the other to an impulsive response, may arouse the same response in his own system if he is affected directly by his attitude as the other form is stimulated. This takes place notably in the use of the vocal gesture, or any gesture which can be used for language. When this has once taken place in its most primitive form, there is set up the mechanism for the individual's acting toward himself as an object, a mechanism which involves the individual's identifying himself with
(428) the object-at first the social object. It is this experience which contains the content which is legitimately connoted by "consciousness," i.e., not only the presence of the object in experience but also the presence of the object in the range of the experience of the organism or individual. It should be added that this identification of the individual with the object is the condition of the individual appearing in his experience as an object and has the importance which this indicates. It follows, also, that this content of the thing is one which is never found in the analysis of the object but is always projected into the interior of the part reached by the analysis and with which again we identify ourselves. Analysis of things never gives us anything more than new surfaces and contours. The surfaces are there, while the inner resistance is something that is supplied from the individual. In supplying it, the individual himself becomes an object. This content of the thing which can never be found directly in the object is presumably the basis for the concept of a substance which appears only in its qualities in experience. It is also the basis for the so-called subjective idealisms, though it is important to note that this use carries with it inevitably the same destructive judgment upon the self as upon the object, as Hume has abundantly pointed out. The self as an object is dependent upon the presence of other objects with which the individual can identify himself.
At the risk of belaboring the point, I wish to insist that the self does not transfer its kinaesthetic sensation to the object but that, through the tendency to push as a physical thing against one's own hand in the role of another individual, one has become a physical object over against the physical thing. Such a development of the physical thing over against the physical self is an abstraction from an original social experience, for it is primarily in social conduct that we stimulate ourselves to act toward ourselves as others act toward us and thus identify ourselves with others and become objects to ourselves. The identification lies in the identity in the conduct of others toward ourselves with that conduct toward ourselves which we have tended
(429) to call out in our own organisms. The child by his cry has called out a tendency in his own organism to soothe himself. The identity in kind of this with the sympathetic response of the parent is the identification of the child with the parent. The earliest objects are social objects, and all objects are at first social objects. Later experience differentiates the social from the physical objects, but the mechanism of the experience of things over against a self as an object is the social mechanism. The identification of the individual with physical objects which appears in the effective occupation of space is a derivative of this. The identity in the response of the thing, and in the response which we call out in ourselves in acting upon a physical thing, is given in embracing or grasping or fingering a thing. The thing presses against us as we press against ourselves. We pass on into the thing the pressure which we exert against it in grasping it, and this is something more than the appearance of its surfaces in our experience plus the effort we exert in pressing. The something more is the location of the act of pressing in the thing, over against our own response, and this capacity for location of the act within the thing by our own action against it is what has passed over to our physical conduct from social conduct-passed over by way of abstraction, for the social object is also physical. Out of it arises in experience a physical self, also an abstraction from a social self. The location of the act in the thing takes place as a condition of the appearance of the physical self, therefore it is not a projection of the self or the experience or sensation of the self in the thing. It is also to be sharply distinguished from the color, or rough or smooth surface, or the warmth, or taste, or odor of the thing. These qualities are there irrespective of what we usually call our consciousness of the, thing. We are conscious of the thing, again using customary psychological terminology, when an act that arises in our own organisms is located in the thing. This location is rendered possible because the act has aroused a response of resistance in our own organisms which is also the reaction of the thing upon us. That is, we define the action of the thing
(430) in terms of this resistance which exists in our organisms as an other or as others. It seems to be a reaction that may be located in the thing and which then gives rise to the physical self as an object; it may be recognized as a reaction of the organism and then as the form of a presentation of the thing.
The picture that we get is the following: In the interrelations of organism and environment, the selection of the organism is responsible for the form of the objects in the environment and the organism's sensitivities for certain qualities of these objects, while the environment is responsible through its stimulations for the response of the organism. In certain situations, notably the social situations, the organism stimulates itself to respond as the object in the environment will respond to the stimulation. The identity of the reaction of the object upon the organism, and the reaction which is aroused in the organism toward itself, isolates a content which is now the object acting upon the organism, and now the individual acting as the object toward the organism. The individual so tending to act is the self, and the object is an object of which we say that we are conscious. The physical object has an interior in the same sense that the social object, or the other, has an interior. It is one which is provided by the organism tending to act toward itself as the physical or social object acts toward the organism. Indeed the physical object is but an abstraction from the social object. It is this inner content of the physical object that constitutes its matter, its effective occupation of space. It is further abstracted by physical science as mass for the purposes of measurement, first as the quantity of matter, then as that which is proportional to its inertia. It follows from this identical content of the physical thing and the organism as a physical thing that the physical thing which Is distant that is not only spatially but temporally away from us, can be presented as existing at the same moment with ourselves. The physical object as made up of surfaces is still distant in the sense that its inner reality can be reached only by further divisions, a goal at infinity, but the inner reality is there in the same instant that we are there. But
(431) it is matter only in the sense of this inner reality with its immediately bounding surfaces that is there. The other qualities of material things, their color, sound, odor, and temperature, are not there at the instant. To be there, they have to be translated into terms of matter and fields of force.
This content of pressure in the physical object appears, first of all, as part of the imagery which goes into the object as existing at a distance. The various contact experiences we have had of such objects enter in our perception to make the physical thing what it is In experience. It is only when the individual in social conduct arouses in himself the tendency to act as the other, to press against his own organism as the physical object will press against it, that it becomes stuff or matter of which we say that we are conscious. And it is then that our own organisms become physical objects of the same stuff. This content of the effective occupation of space logically antedates the appearance both of the physical object and of the physical organism as an object. There is, then, a distinction between things as trees, stones, animals, and men, and these things as having the same content in them which appears in ourselves in so far as we also effectually occupy space. It is because the content is the same that it is possible for us to be conscious of physical things, including our own organisms as physical things, for "consciousness" connotes here the identifying of the effects of resistances and movements of things with the efforts made in our organisms in dealing with these things. Given this identity, we can arouse in our organisms the attitudes and changes of physical things and so act toward ourselves as physical things. We can and do distinguish between things and the matter or matters of which things are made. We distinguish between ourselves as social beings and as material things-our bodies. We reach an indifferent stuff, or stuffs, out of which things as they appear in direct experience are made up. It is important to recognize that in doing this we are abstracting from all the other characters of things and that this abstraction has to be accounted for. But it is equally important to note that the character which is the
(432) basis for this abstraction, that of effective occupation of space, is the only character of the physical thing which is common to the thing and the physical organism in the experience. Because we find in our experience colored, sounding, odorous, sapid, and warm or cold objects, we do not assume that we have the color, sound, odor, or temperature of the thing.
P. THE DETERMINATION OF CO-ORDINATE SYSTEMS
There is another phase of the social mechanism which is involved in the appearance of the physical object over against the physical self. This mechanism has arisen out of the organized response of the individual to the group in co-operative activities, in which the individual, taking the roles of different members of the group involved in the co-operative activity, can address himself as a self. This organized group reaction of the individual over against himself 1 have termed the generalized other. In the wide field of logic and mathematics this represents the universally common attitudes of members of human society in significant conversation and reaction to the environment, in so far as the environment of the race is uniform. This uniform response of all men to the common environment, or the environment in so far as it is uniform, finds its expression in a Euclidean space, with some fixed set of co-ordinates, and a fixed unit determined by some accepted rhythmically repeated change assumed as uniform, such as the revolution of the earth upon its axis, or the vibration of an electron in causing a light wave. In so far as a mathematical statement of the numerical characters of the spatial and temporal magnitudes can abstract from an actual system of co-ordinates involved in our reactions to the common environment, and from a uniform magnitude of the time unit in change these fixed co-ordinates and units of time systems may be abandoned, and the generalized other would represent this most highly abstract common mathematical technique. Such would be the situation under a theory of general relativity. This brings us back to the two situations within which there is experimental evidence for the relativistic theory,
(433) that of the electrical particle and that of the measurement of stellar changes of a galactic order. This doctrine contemplates the change of the time systems of experience with the corresponding change of space co-ordinates, or , rather, of the whole order of extension, with its temporal and spatial phases. The shift from one order to another answers to the determination of the location of rest, or the-for the time being-fixed set of co-ordinates of space. This fixed set of co-ordinates derivative from the field of rest is oriented with reference to the individual organism and his possible movements toward objects about him. The axis of ordinates runs through the individual in an erect position, but an erect position maintained by tendencies to move in various directions. It is the result of compensating pulls. The axis of abscissas runs from the individual to the object of perception and normally along the line of vision. It is the field within which man's possible motions may take place. For the proper organization of this field it is essential that in movement and arrival the individual should find the resistances which are advertised in vision or other distance experience.
The field of rest is that within which the motion of the individual takes place, with reference to whose resistances and organized positions successful action, both in the expenditure of effort and in the determination of direction, can go on. Normally this field of rest is oriented with reference to the goal, the terminus ad quem, in so far as the individual has identified himself with this object which is the goal and has run through it the axis of ordinates which belongs to his own erect attitude. It is through the experience of vision that the whole landscape is geometrically constituted as a field of rest within which the individual moves. Within it other motions take place, but still within a stable environment. Moving things are placed within a field at rest. The establishment of the ultimate field of rest (a fixed space for the perceptual world) involves the ability of the individual to place himself now in one object, or position, and now in another. In the case of the inability to determine whether one's own train is moving or one beside it, the individ-
(434) -ual identifies himself now with one situation and now with the other, but from the standpoint of either and of both there is a fixed environment in terms of which the relative changes of the two trains can be determined. The fixed environmental space implies a third position with which the individual identifies himself, and from which he could determine whether one body or the other were moving, or both. This identification of the individual with different positions, or the bodies that occupy them, takes us back to the social mechanism by which thought proceeds. There is, of course, no limit to the assuming of positions outside those involved in the moving bodies, for it is possible to assume that the one taken as at rest is itself moving and that another outside this must be taken. So long as the situation is presented in a problematic form, there is no ultimate fixed space which could be determined in perceptual experience, although for actual motion in perceptual experience there is always a fixed space determined by the act.
These different spatial situations, determined by the answer to the question, "What body is moving with reference to others?" are all visual or distance hypotheses. As soon as one undertakes to act, one has in so far accepted some one of the hypotheses and has a fixed space. This is on the basis of one's expending effort and, consequently, comes back to one's contact experience. Thus our action fixes the earth as stable and the sun as moving, but we find that we can assume that the sun is stable relative to the earth while the earth moves, so that in our elaborate scientific action we proceed upon the Copernican hypothesis. In this case we set up a stable spatial situation within which all the bodies of the solar system move. The movement of the system with reference to other stars, and of our galaxy with reference to other galaxies, introduces the problem in its widest form. While action fixes for that situation a certain spatial situation, this does not preclude the possibility that this whole spatial situation may represent a motion not involved in the present act. That is, we are deprived of any decisive experience which tests our hypothesis. Actual movement as an ex-
(435) -penditure of effort would remain unaffected, but the determination of this in visual fields by relative change of position could not be assured.
Q. INADEQUACY OF THE TRADITIONAL MECHANICAL STATEMENT OF THE WORLD
It is in this world at an instant, derived for purposes of measurement, that the conflicts noted above arise, as well as those of Zeno, and it is in this world that the theory of relativity has its raison d'être. For it is in the opposition between this ideal limit and the space-time of experience that the possibility of different families of duration appear.
The world at an instant is an ideal limit that is never reached, is not included in the infinite series, and never could be reached even in an infinite approach. From the standpoint of a world of objects which have a common content of effective occupation of space, a world which includes the physical self as that about which the environment is organized through selection, the world at an instant exists, and has a certain space-time structure which is Euclidean, with a constant time unit. If, by the social mechanism of thought or reflection, an individual transfers himself to another object and organizes the environment from the standpoint of the co-ordinates of that center, lie selects another family of durations, another space-time, if the object is in motion while the individual is at rest or vice versa.
The basis for this lies in the assumption that there is in the experience which is organized about the individual and the environment a content of effort in the organism of the individual which is aroused by the pressure of the individual upon the object, and which goes into the object. Because this content is in the organism, the individual may identify himself with the object, and act toward his own physical organism by way of resistance to his own pressure, and thus become a physical object over against the first object. It is this possibility of taking now the one position and now the other that constitutes what is termed the consciousness of the object, as well as of the self
(436) as a physical object. In this process the organism fulfils a double function.
The implications of this assumption can only be arrived at by considering what the object in perception consists of, We find the following contents: First, the characters termed distance experiences. They belong to the object as stimuli calling out reactions of the organism, which involve possible movements toward or away from the object, or adjustments of the organism to its immediate extended environment, determining the path of movements, and the postures and attitudes of the organism at rest or in movement. Their appearance in experience is dependent upon what we term the existence of something in the environment (except in the case of hallucinations) and upon the selective activity of the organism. Existence in the environment connotes a further possible experience of going to the object and attaining contact experiences which would complete the act which is responsible for their selection. The selection may be called a sensitizing of the organism to the stimuli which serve to mediate the impulse seeking expression. Distance characters in experience may prove delusive-the object may not be found to be in the position which the act that it calls out, or tends to call out, indicates. Such distant stimuli of vision, sound, odor, air, and temperature are assumed to exist in the environment, but through refraction, reflection, and adjustments of past experience, or the movements of air currents, the reactions of the organism called out by the stimuli do not lead to the contact experiences which complete the act. Or contents of imagery may have entered into the distance experience which do not correspond to the distance contents which later experience brings nut, as in the case of the mistaken recognition of a friend, or the misreading of the printed page. Or such imagery of a distance Sort may answer to no contact experience at all, as in the case of hallucinations. The sensitizing of the organism to stimuli may be due to physiological changes, incident to organic conditions, or it may be due to the presence of imagery of the stimulus which would complete the act and which coincides
(437) with and emphasizes the similar stimuli in the environment. We speak of the relation of the object as determined ultimately by contact experience to stimulation as a causal relation. The material object is spoken of as causing the experience of vision, for example, through the intervening physical mediums. This relation is absent in the relation of imagery to the experience of perception. In common psychological phraseology imagery is spoken of as centrally excited sensation. There is, however, no evidence of any mechanism in the central nervous system which can take the place of the external object. For this reason it is assumed by certain psychologists that there is a stimulation of the end organ from the central system which returns to the central tracts and there arouses the tracts to activity which can be spoken of as the effect of the peripheral causal disturbance. This, however, still leaves out the original central disturbance as the causal factor which is responsible for the excitation in the peripheral organ that, in turn, is the immediate causal factor of the experience which appears as image. If we seek for the physical situation in the central nervous system which answers to the image, and which would be responsible for selective stimulation of the sense organ, it is generally stated in terms of past associations with other tracts, such that the excitement of these other tracts arouses the tract in question to an activity which is largely identical with the excitement which was the causal antecedent of the original experience. As there is no causal relation, in mechanical terms, between the original excitement of this tract and the experience of the colored, sounding, odorous, and felt object (as colored, sounding, odorous, and felt ), but only an assumed uniform succession of the particular experience upon the particular excitement in certain parts of the nervous system, there seems to be no reason for assuming that, when these parts are again excited, this time by association fibers instead of by afferent fibers from the sense organs, there should not arise the same or like experiences-in other words, images of objects experienced in the past. There seems to be no ground for assigning the physical object as the cause for the full experi-
(438) -ence of immediate perception if we are debarred from considering the image as the cause of the secondary experience, unless this is to be found in the assumption that the image does not exist until this excitement occurs, while the physical object is the uniform antecedent of the perception. This assumption is certainly in need of further grounding than it has yet received. The more fundamental question involved is the relation of the mechanical abstraction to the full experience within which the perceived object and the image both appear. It is evident that the mechanical statement, i.e., a statement in terms of physical particles in motion, is inadequate to the object as it appears in the environment and to the experience of the individual as it appears in perception.
The mechanical statement makes an abstraction of the content of the object which is the test of the reality of that which appears in perception, in other words, of the contact value which will be obtained if one actually reaches and manipulates the object. Furthermore, it states this content in the form in which it is experienced as existing at the instant of perception. This form, as we have seen, is the spatially bounded content of effort in the organism which can be located either in the object or in the physical self, and which constitutes the interior of the scientific physical object. In the interest of exactness in measurement, this is found in the smallest dimensions possible. This amounts to abstracting from the content of the object as expressed in its relationship to the environment of the living form, or as determined by any process which could not be stated in terms of a field of force, and from all the distance values. But while the mechanical statement abstracts from these contents, they can all be translated into mechanical term,;, though at the expense of their characters as distance qualities, or as objects. The same is true in regard to the part that the individual plays in the constitution of the environment and in the appearance of so-called sensuous qualities. This part of the individual's function can be mechanically stated in the scientific account of the physical organism and its fields of force.
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In the case of imagery as content of the object, it is not true that this can be translated in mechanical terms. That which goes on in the central tract of the nervous system of the organism can be stated in mechanical terms as in the case of direct perception, but the content of the image, as something that is there, has no counterpart in terms of physical particles unless one retreats to the original experience which is regarded as the source of the later imagery. One interpretation of this situation in which the image cannot be given a definite spatiotemporal position justified by later contact experience is to deny the image existence by granting it only subsistence. The difficulty with this lies in the seemingly causal dependence of the appearance of the image upon certain conditions in the central nervous system-unless we are willing to look upon the image as a mental state that has reality only as such, and inheres in the object only as an importation, which upon analysis loses its external reality.
The difficulty with this mechanical statement, which places the reality of the object in the physical particles in motion (a presentation which includes the physiological organism), and leaves the distance characters and those belonging to the object as object within the life-process hanging without organic relation to the perception (placed either in a field of so-called consciousness or in a world of subsistences), lies in an implication of the mechanical statement that the object of perception and scientific conception is logically prior to the earlier stage of experience out of which perception and reflection arises, and that this scientific analysis reveals the reality of nature, not only as it was but as it remains in experience, to the exclusion from the same field of reality of all from which this mechanical statement abstracts. To _leal up this implication, it is necessary to retreat to the earlier form of experience, before that within which the object of perception and the scientific object appear. This stage of experience is that of bare happening from the standpoint of the individual and of bare duration from the standpoint of the environment. Within it there are as yet no
(440) objects and no organized structure of space and time. The character of this experience upon which Whitehead has insisted is that it is extended in the sense that its durations, whether considered from the spatial or temporal standpoint, always extend over any phase that arises for discrimination. Its continuum is never the sum of additive elements but a given happening or duration within which discriminations take place. The discriminated portions are open to further discriminations, with no limit which can belong to the series of such an analysis. In the movement of this duration, that which appears does not add itself to the next but finds itself within another duration which extends over the earlier.
It is evident that in such a duration there could be neither a perceptual nor a scientific object, for an object persists throughout a duration. Even a duration becomes an object only in so far as its quantitative character is found in other durations, and the quantitative expression for this can be found in some object, generally spatial, which does persist throughout a duration. In an experience which is merely ongoing such an object cannot be present. An organism could be affected by distant stimuli and act appropriately toward them, but these stimuli would not be objects nor would any of the ongoing experiences or events take on an objective form. Such an ongoing experience or event passes, and this passing exhausts its durational content. And yet this event does extend over other events in experience. So-called sensible experience is not a knife edge but a duration. If the end of a durational experience could be present at its beginning and throughout it, there would be the material for an object within it.
As we have seen, this is the case in a perceptual object. It is not simply that through memory-imagery we can see the distant stimulus as hard. If this experience were simply a passing experience, there would be no persistence, any more than the continued vision of the color of the distant stimulus in approaching it would involve the experience of the persistence of the color. It is only when the fact that the same thing is con-
(441) -tinually in experience is itself in experience that there appears persistence and a possible object. It is in so far as the organism in grasping or embracing the thing passes on its own effort of pushing against its own expenditure of effort into the thing that the continued expenditure of effort appears in experience. The mechanism for passing on this expenditure into the object is undoubtedly social. It is in the social co-operative act that the individual has first stimulated himself to act as the other acts, and first utilizes this attitude in conduct, and has thus become a thing or object in experience. Then the continued character of the stimulus, calling out one's reaction, passes into experience over against the various phases of the response. So far as the individual is continuously identified with the stimulus in the duration, the fact that it is there as the prospective terminus of the act enters into the experience. The identification of the individual with the stimulus keeps his action with reference to the stimulus always in the experience. The statement just made is inaccurate, for the individual does not immediately identify himself with the object, but the same content is alternately identified with the object and the physical self. This content is the resistance which appears in the organism when it grasps or embraces the thing. When the pressures against the thing are put inside it, it is the object, and, when they are directed against the thing, its surfaces bounding this inside, it is the physical organism. It is easy to recognize that the pressure with which the object resists invasion is the pressure exercised by the muscles grasping or embracing it, though it passes on to the inside of the thing, and that this inside is a content which is never reached by division, which indeed reveals to vision and touch only new surfaces. It is also easy to recognize that it is only in so far as the thing gets such an inside that it becomes an object. It will also be recognized that this pressure from the inside of the object appears in the object only in so far as the organism actually or in imagination does grasp or embrace it, only in so far as the organism becomes an object over against the resisting object. It is the attitude of pressure
(442) appearing as an inside of the object and as the reaction to this object that constitutes the possibility of there being objects and physical selves over against the objects, and which constitutes the necessity of their reciprocal character, a reciprocity which has already been found in the correlative nature of the organism and the environment.
The object perceived in distance experience has the content of resistance which belongs also to the physical self as imaginatively grasping it. It exists, then, in the present experience of the organism. The content of its present reality is that which belongs to the here and now of the organism's experience. Its reality has the same durational coefficient as that of the organism. We express this by saying that, though the objects are at distances, i.e., have a reality that could only be experienced by an act reaching into the future, and are affected by a durational coefficient that is different from that of the organism, still the material reality that lies inside all these objects of distance experience is that of a here and now.
It is this combination of the coefficients of the future and of the here and the now (the future in so far as the act as an ongoing affair gives the experience of futurity, and the here and the now in so far as that belongs to the immediate attitude of the individual), which presents in experience the object toward which action is directed as persistent, i.e., presents an object the continued experience of which is itself present in experience. This obtains also for the organism as a physical object. Thus the character of the inside of the organism and of the object constitutes what Whitehead calls an adjective of the physical elements extending in a field of force into a causal future.
