Cultural Reality
Chapter 5: The Theoretic Orders of Reality
Florian Znaniecki
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THE GENERAL FEATURES OF THEORETIC RATIONALIZATION
The imperfect and multiform organization of reality super-constructed by practical activity upon the world 'of concrete historical objects serves in turn as a foundation for a new superstructure, the rational order which knowledge imposes upon its object-matter.
We cannot, of course, give here a complete theory of knowledge which presupposes a general theory of activity and constitutes the most arduous task of philosophy. We shall limit ourselves to the minimum of indications necessary to understand the connection between knowledge and reality in so far as it affects the latter.
The fundamental points which must be kept in mind are that, on the one hand, knowledge constitutes itself a part of cultural reality, the domain of ideas, each of which has a content drawn from some other reality and a meaning due to its connection with other ideas; and that, on the other hand, each idea is objectified and stabilized thought, which at any moment can be actualized again as thought, as an activity of which reality is the object-matter. As a reality, the domain of ideas has a rational organization of its own, whose character is formally practical, that is, which manifests itself in situations, schemes, and dogmas, just as the rational organization of technical or political reality; and there is a special activity, which might be called theoretically practical, if such a term did not seem stranger still than that of ideal reality, which we have used to distinguish the domain of ideas from all other reality. The task of this activity is to create new ideas, both on the ground of real data and on
(231) the ground of pre-existing ideas. The instruments of this creation, with the help of which ideas become fixed and incorporated into the pre-existing ideal reality, are symbols, and the complexes of pre-existing ideas organized for the creation of new ideas are systems of knowledge. A system of knowledge, once ready, may be time after time actualized as a system of active thoughts bearing upon reality, and thus produce a more or less wide and complicated systematization of reality, which, since it does not tend to create any new objects within the reality upon which the actualized system of knowledge bears and includes no instruments, can be called a theoretic systematization in the original sense of the term, that is, a systematization by observation.
Now, this systematic theoretic order imposed by knowledge upon reality is not a copy, a reproduction of the systematic organization which knowledge finds ready and constructed by practical activity. A system of objects may be practically reproduced in the sense of being constructed again, as a schematic situation is, time after time; we know reproduction in this sense from the preceding sections and we hardly need to mention that the practically, even if only mentally, reproduced system is always still a practical system—technical, political, etc. — and not knowledge of a system. Or a system of objects may be reproduced in concrete experience without being practically followed in its organization, as a more or less complex datum; but such a "representation" of a system is not a knowledge of this system, but is this system itself becoming an object, an element of experience, with a given content and a meaning which it acquires in actuality. Reproduction in this sense, as a mere introduction of the system as a datum into the present sphere of experience and reflection, t not knowledge, any more than the reappearance of any object "in memory" is; we may call it acquaintance with the system, but acquaintance is only making objects accessible to individual theoretic
(232) activity, collecting materials out of which knowledge still has to be built. And when knowledge is built, both the way in which its elements or ideas are determined and the way in which they are systematized are completely different from the pre-existing determination and systematization of the objects upon which these ideas are based.
The content of the idea is, indeed, drawn from reality, since nothing but reality can be given; and yet the idea is not the reality which is its object-matter, but is objectified thought about this reality. This seeming contradiction, the necessity and the apparent impossibility of distinguishing the idea from its object-matter, has been one of the main stumbling-stones of the philosophy of knowledge, and there lies the source of that strange conception of ideas being subjectively psychological copies of objects, similar in content but different in being from their originals. This conception was the more readily accepted since it fell in with the practical distinction between real and unreal elements of practical activity of which we have spoken in the preceding chapter, and since moreover (a point which we shall discuss later) theoretic ideas when used for practical purposes are mostly actualized during the first period of activity when the aim is being constructed but waits to be realized, and when therefore activity is taken to be only mental from the standpoint of the second, instrumental, period. When, however, the study of concrete historical reality has forced us to reject the concept of representations as subjective copies of objects, we must search for a different and less arbitrary distinction between ideas and the reality from which they are drawn.
The whole difficulty comes from the prepossession that knowledge reproduces reality in its pre-existing determination and systematization, whereas the very difference between knowledge and its object-matter, and thus the very existence of knowledge as something distinct from its object-matter,
(233) are empirically manifested precisely in the specific and original determination and systematization which it gives to its object-matter. The act of thought which is the ideal ground of an idea cannot be given as object-matter, but its real results can be, and it is by its results as differing from the results of other acts that we recognize it and define it. In order to objectivate it as an idea, to oppose the idea as a specific object to the original object-matter of the act of thought, we must isolate the result of this act from the total concrete reality, stabilize it, raise it above the historical extension and duration of the sphere of experience to which it belongs. This is called theoretic idealization and requires the use of the symbol. The symbol is a real pre-existing object with which the given result of a theoretic act of thought becomes connected and, in so far as taken in this connection alone, can be treated as an object independent of its empirical context, and not as a mere modification of other objects. But that empirical result of the theoretic act, that real datum which the symbol helps to idealize, must be in some way different from the results of practical acts which construct practical systems of objects; otherwise there would be no difference between theory and practice. A symbolic connection is not limited to the field of knowledge; in fact, every concrete object might be called a symbol in that it has a meaning which suggests acts that lead to other empirical objects. A symbol in the special and definite sense of the term is characterized by the fact that it expresses an idea; but it can express an idea also only by suggesting acts which lead to some object-matter, and therefore the specific empirical difference which characterizes the symbol as a theoretic instrument must come directly from that object-matter which it symbolizes. In fact, the formation of an idea implies as the first and indispensable condition the establishment of a connection between the given property, relation, thing, process, or even
(234) a whole system, if the latter in its entirety becomes the object-matter of knowledge, and other properties, relations, things, processes, systems, outside of the organization of reality of which the given object-matter is a part. This connection consists in the production, or reproduction, of a uniformity, that is, a community of determination between the objects which are being connected, quite independently of any differences which they may possess in the different real systems to which they respectively belong. Using traditional terms, we shall say that the first condition, the starting-point of the formation of an idea is abstraction and generalization. It is abstraction, in so far as the given object of theoretic thought, in order to be connected with other objects on the ground of uniformity, has to become isolated from the whole real systematic organization to which it belongs; it is generalization, in so far as it can be isolated from the real practical system of which it is objectively a part only by being connected with other objects outside of this system on the ground of some common determination, by being taken as one particular empirical manifestation of a super-systematic uniformity.
This uniformity of properties, relations, processes, things, systems, outside of their respective organizations, even in so far as it exists previous to theoretic thought, is clearly not a real relation or even a pre-existing practical connection between them, but the result of the fact that they have been determined in a similar way each in its particular organization; that a certain similar kind of connection has been at various times and in various places established between each of these objects which we generalize and some other objects which may be quite different from case to case. The source of this uniformity of objects can therefore be only an ideal uniformity of the acts which have determined them, and the theoretic thought which connects objects on the ground of their uniformity follows in fact the traces that certain
(235) ideal characteristics of active thought have left upon the reality which this active thought has created in the past. But the full demonstration of this proposition belongs with the theory of active thought.
What is evident here is that the isolation and subordination of the particular to the general by which, using particular real data as material, we construct the content of an idea does not correspond to any pre-existing real order. In practical reality, as we have seen, all direct rational determination of objects is within a situation, and if objects present similar characteristics, it is as inseparable elements of situations, not as variations of common real essences. An actually given object appearing in individual experience may be indeed a particular variation of the total concrete historical object; but a particular property, relation, process, thing, is not really a variation of more general property, relation, process, or thing; and if a system may be considered as a variation of some other system, it is only if taken with regard to its form, to the nature of its organization as determined by the same kind of active thought and not with regard to the real matter it contains.
The content of an idea is thus constructed as a unity of all these particular determinations of reality which become connected by theoretic thought on the ground of their uniformity, as variations of one more general determination. We know, of course, that theoretic thought seldom, if ever, actually embraces all the particular determinations which may be subordinated to the same general determination, all the "particulars" of a "universal"; but in so far as the idea can be actualized again and again, the system of determinations which it creates may be said to contain virtually all the particular determinations of this common form which will ever be found in experience. Between the content of several ideas again some more general uniformity may be found and these ideas subordinated to one common idea
(236) whose content is directly constituted as a unity of their contents and indirectly as a unity of all these determinations of reality which they have unified.
The content of the idea roots thus in reality by the nature of its materials, but rises above and outside of reality by the nature of the unification of these materials, to which no real systematic unity of objects corresponds, only an ideal uniformity of the acts that have determined them in the past, which is the genetic source of the common form of these objects, though the latter belong to different real systems. And the more general an idea, the more evident is the lack of any pre-existing real connection between the determinations which are unified in it, the more indubitable the ideal ground of this unification; if anyone should doubt whether empirical "rednesses" or empirical "tables" are not interconnected really, there can be hardly any doubt, except on the ground of mediaeval realism, that only a common form, no real bond, unifies all the empirical "colors" or empirical "pieces of furniture," when theoretic thought begins to connect them as members of a class.
But it is not enough to give to the idea a content; it must acquire a meaning for science, become a full element of the ideal reality by being connected with other pre-existing ideas. Only by this connection, as part of a system of ideas, its content becomes definitively stabilized and determined as independent—on its ideal, if not on its real side—of the concrete evolution of reality in extension and duration, so that the real data on which it is based may evolve and even completely disappear from actual experience, while the idea will persist together with the system of knowledge into which it has been incorporated. In so far as ideas must be expressed in symbols, since without a symbol a thought cannot be objectivated as an idea, symbols are also indispensable instruments of the systematization of ideas, because actual connections of ideas can become stable relations only if
(237) expressed in relations of symbols; at the same time the meaning of the symbol itself, as of an instrument, can be stabilized completely only by this use in relation with other instruments symbols to express a system of ideas.
The systematic connection by which ideas acquire their scientific meaning is, of course, not subordination of the relatively particular to the relatively general, since this already determines their content, but analytic or synthetic subsumption of the relatively concrete to the relatively abstract. A system of ideas is either the product of an analysis of an idea into several different ideas, which are precisely therefore assumed to be simple within the limits of this system, or the product of a synthesis from several different ideas of an idea, which is precisely therefore assumed to be compound within the limits of this system.
We use the term concept exclusively to indicate an idea which is, and in so far as it is, analyzed into or synthetized from other ideas. The concept is clearly not exhausted by the ideas into which it is analyzed, nor is it fully created by a synthesis of other ideas. It must always have a content of its own independent of these ideas, which cannot be obtained otherwise than by the observation of reality and is always a unity of uniform empirical determinations common to many real data; if it has no real foundation, it has no content and therefore is not a distinct idea but a mere complex of different ideas. The analysis or synthesis is not supposed to determine its content, but to give this content a meaning, to establish a connection between it and other ideas; in analysis its content has been already created beforehand, whereas in synthesis it remains empirically unknown and will have to be created by empirical observation after its meaning has been determined, and thus after certain rational conditions have been imposed on this creation. On the other hand, the ideas into which the concept is analyzed or from which it is synthetized are not exhausted by their connection
(238) with the concept; each of them has an empirical content which would remain even if the concept were not there and which may serve for the analysis or synthesis of many other concepts; the connection with the concept and with the other ideas into which the concept is analyzed gives only a definite scientific meaning to the given content of the idea. If it has no content drawn from reality independently of the concept, then it is not a separate idea but a mere part of the concept.[ 1]
A concept which has been or will be analyzed into or synthetized from other ideas can, as we know, play the part of a simple idea, an element of analysis or synthesis, with regard to some other concept; and vice versa, an idea which was treated as simple element in one system may become an analyzed concept in another. In this way, indefinitely complicated scientific systems may be constructed by a hierarchical subsumptive organization.
What is the connection between this systematic order of ideas and the pre-existing organization of reality? We see, indeed, that just as the content of particular ideas has a foundation in reality, so the relation between ideas as manifested in synthesis and analysis is based upon reality as upon its original material. The relation between the concept of a thing and the ideas of properties into which it is analyzed has its real ground in the coexistence of the properties corresponding to these ideas in the empirical things; the relations between ideas ,in the theoretic definition of the concept of a certain type of situations is founded upon the internal unity of each situation of this type as including certain really interrelated things and developing in certain teleologically or causally ordered processes; the relation of ideas in the
(239) theoretic definition of the concept of a certain type of scheme is drawn from the systematic organization of the situations as conditioned by each scheme of this type, etc. But the rational ground of the coexistence of properties in a particular thing, of the coexistence of things, relations, and processes in a particular situation, of the coexistence of situations in a particular scheme, is completely different from the rational ground of the systematic organization of the ideas of the properties as analytically or synthetically connected with the concept of a thing, of the organization of the ideas of things, relations, and processes as analytically or synthetically connected with the concept of a situation, of the organization of the ideas of situations as analytically connected with the concept of the scheme.
The empirically given thing has the properties which it has because it is determined with regard to other things contained in the situation; the concept of a thing is analyzed into certain ideas of properties because empirical things belonging under this concept, which on the ground of a certain common form that they possess have been made the material of this idea, possess properties of certain classes, none of which, however, is necessarily limited to things belonging under this concept but may be also found, with the same general form, in things belonging under other concepts. The empirically given particular situation contains the things, relations, processes, which it does contain because it is so determined with regard to other situations in the realization of a scheme; the concept of the situation is analyzed into certain ideas of things, relations, processes, because the empirical situations of a certain class, which, on the ground of a common form or a similarity of organization which they possess, are the material of one idea, include things, relations, processes, whose common forms can be found empirically manifested not only in situations of this class, but also in situations of other classes. And so on. In short, science can indeed
(240) reconstruct theoretically any empirical, practically rational organization of reality, but only by isolating it from the wider organization by which it is determined, by ignoring the real factors which made it what it is, by taking it as granted, as self-existing material of a concept.
Then, having thus severed the real links which unified it with a wider system of reality, it determines its entire constitution from the standpoint of an entirely different rational systematization. just as in the formation of an idea each particular empirical datum which constitutes its real material becomes connected with many other empirical data which present the same general form, to whatever systems they may belong, so in the formation of a system of ideas each particular empirical organization which is its material becomes variously and more or less closely connected with many other empirical organizations, with which it may have had no real connection whatever but whose elements present forms similar to those of the elements of the given organization. When an empirical situation becomes not only the object-matter of theoretic generalization but also that of theoretic analysis or synthesis, when it serves not only as the material of an idea but also as the material of a system of ideas in which its intrinsic practical organization will be theoretically reconstructed, then it not only becomes theoretically connected with those situations which have an organization similar to its own, and thus are taken as belonging to the same class, but also with all those situations which, however, they may differ from it in their general form, possess some particular things, relations, processes, formally similar to those things, relations, or processes which the given situation includes.
The same will happen on a higher level when theoretic thought undertakes to reconstruct the connections which it had at first ignored between the situation and other situations in a schematic system of situations. It will then
(241) have to reconstruct theoretically this schematic system of situations in its internal organization, and in doing this it will ignore the connections which may exist between this particular scheme and others, if this scheme is a part of some dogmatic system of schemes. Instead, it will first of all create an idea of a schematic system of situations of which the given one will be a particular case and thereby connect the latter, not with the schemes with which it is really connected, but with all those which present some characteristic uniformity. Then it will analyze this idea, taken as a concept, into ideas corresponding to the particular situations included in the schematic system and their reciprocal determinations, thus connecting the given schematic organization with all those which, even if perhaps completely different from it in their general form, include similar situations.
It may push this analysis still farther, analyze the idea of each situation, taken as a concept, into ideas corresponding to the particular things, relations, processes, included in these situations, and thus connect indirectly the schematic organization with all those that, even if their situations should be different, have at least similar things, relations, or processes within their situations.
Finally, if theoretic reconstruction reaches the dogmatic system of schemes, beyond which the real practical systematization never goes, or if in the given field practical organization has not yet reached a level of systematization higher than the situation or the scheme, then, of course, knowledge has no pre-existing practical connections to ignore; it only creates a new order, but always of a different type from the organization found in practical experience, always based on ideal uniformity instead of real determination. Of course, this creation of an order of reality different from the pre-existing practical systematization of this reality is not the aim of knowledge in the course of the construction of systems of ideas. The latter are constructed for the
(242) creation of new ideas, and while having a foundation in preexisting reality, present a rational organization of their own which, being the product of organized creative activity and resulting from the combination of various materials and instruments for the attainment of definite common results, has within itself the same fundamental forms as the organization of technical, hedonistic, political systems. But knowledge has the privilege of being not only a closed and specific organization of objects, but of being also able to become at any moment an organization of active thoughts which bear upon other fields of reality; and in this bearing, that is, not as static ideas but as dynamic thoughts, imposes upon these other fields of reality an order which these fields did not possess. A system of knowledge when applied to reality as object-matter of .actual theoretic reflection, when regulating our observation, establishes between the many real empirical data which are its object-matter a set of systematic connections, which like all connections have a certain objective realness. This theoretically imposed rationality cannot attain by itself the same degree of realness as a practically established organization, since theoretic thought when directly applied to reality uses no instruments. However, such as it is, it is evidently sufficiently real to influence in a very marked way our common empirical real world, and with the growth and systematization of knowledge, all the domains of historical reality which knowledge has influenced appear to us empirically more and more permeated with a type of rationality which can be only the product of theoretic reflection.
Now, the important feature of knowledge as system of thoughts bearing upon reality is that it makes the rational organization of reality ever wider and more perfect by continually tending, self-consciously or not, to the ideal of a complete theoretic rationalization of the real world. This ideal has found its most radical expression in those philo-
(243) -sophical theories which look upon the real world exclusively in the light of theoretic activity; however, it plays a more or less important part in every philosophy in so far as the latter attempts to give a consistent rational conception of reality as a whole, and in every particular science in so far as it tends to realize it within the particular domain of reality which constitutes its material.
The way in which this ideal is approached differs in various branches of knowledge in so far as some of them neglect entirely the rôle which practical activity has played in organizing the world and take only the last real results of this activity, treating them as self-existing and self-determined in their rationality, whereas others take into account and try to reconstruct theoretically some existing practical systems, either stopping at the situation, or rising to the scheme, or, finally, taking even the dogmatic system of schemes into consideration. Of course, each branch of knowledge, by the very nature of theoretic idealization, has to ignore whatever practical organizations there may be superior to the one which is its special object-matter: if its object-matter is things, relations, or processes, it ignores the situation, and a fortiori the scheme and the dogma; if it idealizes situations, it ignores schemes and dogmas; if its method is specially developed to study schemes, it ignores dogmas.
But whatever kind of organization is its object-matter, knowledge takes this organization as it is in those systems which have pushed it to the highest degree of perfection, and assumes that the rational form of this organization represents a type of rationality which is universally present, if not in all reality, at least in those sections whose order appears as more or less similar to the one accepted as a model.
More than this. Science often appeals to practical activity to construct especial artificial models of rational
(244) organizations in the form of classified collections or experiments, and takes these models as representative of the real order universally latent in empirical reality, or in certain parts of reality at least. Since, as a matter of fact, reality does not grow up to these expectations and lacks the necessary uniformity and perfection of order, science uses two assumptions to justify its claims: the assumption of approximation and that of interference. The first, found whenever we want to reconstruct theoretically a concrete fragment of reality with the help of abstract ideas, consists in accepting the general principle that, although reality does not present a perfect order, still it more or less approximates it, and the problem in each case is simply to determine the rational limits within which the imperfect rationality of experience can be placed. Thus, the variety of empirical organic bodies cannot be perfectly defined as constituting an ideally rational system of species, but an approximate systematization, based upon the assumption of a majority of average individuals approximately realizing the essential characters of the species, is rationally possible.
The other assumption, used when we analyze a concrete fragment of reality [2] into ideal abstract elements, consists in treating the imperfectly rational empirical object-matter as the product of an "accidental," purely matter-of-fact (explicable only by the total concrete reality) combination of perfectly rational real components which in this combination, interfering with each other, cannot manifest fully their several rational essences. No causal law needs ever to be exactly realized in experience because it is always possible to assume that its working has been interfered with in the given case by some other causal law, which
(245) in turn never needs to be perfectly applicable to unprepared experience because of other possible interferences, and so on indefinitely; whereas at the same time it is usually possible at least approximately to reconstruct practically the model situation, the isolated closed system within which it has proved to work, and thus to test it by experiment.
THE PHYSICAL ORDER
The theoretic ideal of the perfect rationality of the world, like every other ideal, continually evolves, and in every historical epoch as we well know finds expression in many partial, imperfectly interconnected and within themselves not always perfectly systematized, scientific and philosophical theories. But all these theories, whatever may be their object-matter and their own systematic organization, can be classified into a very limited number of types with regard to the general, categorical forms which they tend to impose upon reality. The origin of these categorical forms of theoretic reflection lies in the forms which reality acquires in those fundamental types of practical systems which we have studied above. These practical forms which in empirical reality are never perfect and develop only under very definite conditions, as we have seen in the preceding chapter, when generalized and idealized by science as categories become in their actual application to reality methodological presuppositions, helping to create perfectly rational systems of knowledge on the ground of an imperfectly rational reality, and thus to raise the latter also step by step to a higher level of rationality. If formulated as general affirmations about reality as a whole, justifying the belief in the attainment of the theoretic ideal by the assumption that reality is rational itself, they claim to be ontological truths a priori—a claim which, as we shall see, must be rejected.
The oldest and the most firmly established set of such methodological presuppositions, which precisely therefore
(246) has been most frequently ascribed an ontological validitywhether with regard to absolute "noumenal" or to "phenomenal" reality only, is immaterial—is the one that constitutes the formal foundation of that branch of knowledge which ignores entirely practical systems and takes as its objectmatter the ultimate elements of reality. These it treats as if they were all perfectly determined in perfect rational situations but without regard to the situations themselves to which they owe whatever determinations they really possess. This branch, to which all natural sciences of the material reality belong, without exactly splitting into two distinct parts, tends nevertheless to a division of problems into two groups, each of which presupposed an elementary order of reality of a somewhat different type. On the one hand we have a static order of things, properties, and relations; on the other hand, a dynamic order of causally determined processes. Let us examine the most frequent forms of each of these orders separately.
In the static order, processes which of course cannot be ignored also have to be logically stabilized; this is done by analyzing them into states of things, so that each process is taken as a succession of states. Now, a state is a property of the thing, and in this way the category of property is divided in two: permanent properties, qualities, including quantitative determinations when taken as belonging to the thing itself and not as expressing merely relations; and changing properties, states. This type of rationalism, as we have said, most frequently passes from a methodological to an ontological application of these categories, and it does this by an implicit or explicit reasoning which can be briefly resumed in this manner. Because any empirical complex of objects can be theoretically reconstructed as a rational system of things, qualities, states, and relations, all reality objectively is constituted by things, qualities, states, and relations. In the most radical philosophical expression of this ontologism the
(247) thing becomes a substance, the property an attribute, the state a modus.
The fundamental characteristics of the thing as objectmatter of theoretic reflection are: isolation from and limitation against other things, self-identity, independence of the actual connections within which it is taken. Now, these formal characteristics, which are ascribed to the thing for the purpose of present scientific reconstruction, can be assumed as belonging really and objectively to any particular thing in the measure in which this thing has been already fully determined within a static situation, so that no new determinations are supposed to be added to it by the total situation and thus, in defining theoretically the thing as now given and ready, we do not need to take the situation of which it is a part into account. But suppose now we ignore, not only for particular theoretic purposes, but absolutely, the fact that things are determined by special practical situations and are what they are only within the limits of these situations; suppose we claim that all the objects of which concrete empirical reality is composed are by themselves ontologically things or substances, isolated and limited, self-identical, independent of actual connections. What will be the consequences?
Isolation and limitation, if neither taken as dependent on practical activity which maintains the object as limited or distinct from others, because it makes it determined by others, nor as dependent on theoretic activity which reconstructs the object as isolated or separated from others, because others are ignored for the time of this reconstruction, but as absolute, real characteristics of the thing itself, as static features of reality, are possible only in space. We find in many empirical situations spatial order, more or less pure, substituted for concrete extension; but it is theoretic thought which, by ignoring the particular, variable, and practically limited character of each such empirical spatial organization, constructs the unique, absolute, homogeneous space as the
(248) common receptacle of objectively isolated and limited things, superimposing this abstract rational extension upon the concrete irrational extension of the historical world.
The thing becomes thus a material or quasi-material object, occupying one and only one position in pure extension at a given static moment and spatially separated from other objects; it is determined as this thing by its position in the one common space and the space which it occupies is determined by it. Extension becomes thus something external to the thing itself; the latter has only so much of it left as it possesses within one particular situation where it is supposed given only in one abstract objective here, and it is not entirely inextensive only because it is simultaneously determined from the standpoint of all the other objects included in the situation, each of which has its own distinct here. The theoretic thing is, like the concrete historical object, taken as element of an extensive reality, but since its own extension is limited in advance, its participation in the total extension of the world cannot be internal, based upon the intrinsic extensiveness of its own content and meaning, as it is in the case of the historical object, but external, consisting exclusively in its occupying a definite portion of the one rational space. Therefore, if something exactly similar in content can be localized simultaneously in two different positions of the one rational space, it is two different things. But since it is evidently impossible to substitute space for concrete extension as a milieu of all experiences, since the total empirical content and meaning of a concrete historical object, continually growing, can never be exhausted by any number of similar or dissimilar, specially localized, and rationally determined things, for all those variations of a concrete object which are not determined as isolated elements of perfect material situations and cannot be interpreted as things with definite spatial positions, theoretic reflection adopts a qualification which we have already found in practical organizations
(249) applied to particular fragments of empirical reality, but which in knowledge leads to a distinction cutting the whole world in two. The object which, having one position in rational space, is simultaneously present at various here's of the concrete extension, is taken as a complex of one thing and several subjective representations.
Similarly, the self-identity of the thing as logical subjectmatter is theoretically justified by the fact that the thing in theoretic reflection, for the special purpose of the actually constructed system of ideas, is raised above change; and it is practically possible within the limits of one situation, if practical activity maintains this situation identical against the evolution of empirical reality. But the only way in which the thing could by its own virtue, independently of theoretic or practical activity, remain really, materially self-identical, would be if it were changeless in duration. Since, however, concrete duration is the product of activity and implies necessarily continual growth of historical reality, science has to substitute for this irrational duration a pure rational time, an empty form of existence which exists quite independently, whether objects in it change or remain changeless.
In this objective time the thing has a definite period of duration; it is at all only as long as it is self-identical, remains unchanged—unchanged, of course, in that which constitutes its objective nature as this thing; once changed, it is no more, and a different thing begins to exist instead. Thus, duration, like extension, is put outside of the thing whereas it is within the concrete historical object. Philosophy, by substituting the substance for the thing, goes still farther and denies even that the empty time, the pure external duration, is a receptacle of substances; it is only supposed to include the modi of the substance. A real substance therefore can have no beginning and no end. Remnants of this conception are found up to the present in the principles of conservation of matter and of energy. And in so far as the scientific order of
(250) self-identical things lasting for definite periods of time cannot cover empirical duration, in so far as an object continues or begins to exist in concrete duration after it ceased or before it began to exist as thing in rational time, the same distinction is applied as in the contrast between concrete and spatial extension. An object that is given before or after it had existed as a thing is a distinct phenomenon, a subjective representation of the thing.
Finally, the independence of the thing from the connections in which it is given is again logically justified in so far as, in idealizing the thing theoretically, in incorporating it into a system of ideas, we ignore all modifications which active thought, even our present theoretic reflection itself, may bring into its content and meaning by connecting it with other objects; it is possible really and practically in so far as practical activity makes the thing independent of all other determinations except those which it has received within the closed situation with reference to other things included therein. But as absolutely real characteristic of the thing, independence of all connections would be possible only if the thing, as long as self-identical possessed a complete self-sufficiency, if its relations to other things did not affect it in itself. This implies a complete externality of the relation to the thing. The thing as such cannot be affected by any relation; relation can influence only either its spatial position or the period of pure time in which it is localized, but not its own objective nature. The philosophical substance, for example, the monad of Leibniz, is not subjected to any relations whatever. Any dependence of the object on the empirical connections into which it is brought that does not destroy its self-identity and yet is not reducible to a mere change of localization in time or space is classed as subjective; if the thing is differently given in different connections, it is not that the thing has become a historical concrete object, which varies in varying complexes, but that there are various
(251) psychological copies of it, various mental images taken by different persons or by the same person at different moments. It is clear that a world of ontologically pure things— substances could be only the object-matter of aesthetic contemplation or intuition, not of scientific logical thought, which has to analyze and synthetize idealized things. But when we introduce into reality any ontological category supplementing that of the thing, this means that we are making a concession in favor of experience at the expense of rational consistency, that we have to deprive the thing-substance of its rational inviolability for the sake of the creation of an empirical science. Though there is no logical reason why anything that may disturb the rational perfection of the real thing-substance should not be put out of the way and transferred into the all-suffering and always ready psychological subject, yet as there could be then no science of empirical reality, some of these disturbances, in a proportion which varies from period to period and from science to science, are left with the objective theoretic order of reality to be accounted for. And thus, although things similar in some respects in strict logic cannot be taken as being in any sense objectively unified if they are spatially distinct and isolated from each other, still since things absolutely isolated and therefore absolutely unique would give no ground whatever for analysis, we must assume that their partial similarity is an objective link between them in spite of their spatial isolation. The common quality is objectively one in many things, overcomes their plurality, makes it less absolute. Since it exists simultaneously in spatially separated and distinct things, it is extensive, and yet not spatial, for it is not localized and isolated in space. Through it, a minimum of empirical extension is indirectly re-introduced into the things, which represents an intermediary stage between abstract spatiality and the full concrete extension.
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While the quality of a thing within a particular situation possesses a reality of its own, but only as this particular quality determined from the standpoint of other things within this situation; while the idea of a quality possesses a generality of its own, is one in many objects, but only in so far as idealized, whereas its real basis is always a plurality of particular qualities in particular situations, the quality as ontological category must possess both the reality of the particular quality in a situation and the generality of the idea. It is real because it belongs to real things; it is one in all the things in which it is found because it is not in each case taken as the product of a situation, but as existing by itself. Thus, within the plurality of spatially isolated and limited things there must exist a plurality of general qualities cutting across the static order of things, having each a non-spatial unity and differentiated from others in that special way which we call precisely qualitative distinction. In philosophical rationalization these objective qualities are either mere empirical attributes of substances, if emphasis is laid on the absoluteness of the metaphysical substance, or self-existing metaphysical essences, if substances are treated as no more than empirical things. They are as self-identical in time and as independent of all connections as things. They can be rationally systematized, and their systematic order serves to define things rationally; as we know, ancient and mediaeval science was mainly science of qualities. A thing, to remain self-identical, must possess all the qualities by which it is defined; and therefore any empirical variation of an essential quality which is not a change of the thing is a subjective illusion. And unless the category of the state is also ontologically objectified, a strict rationalism of things and qualities which assumes a purely static order will classify as subjective all those properties which cannot serve to define things permanently, all nonessential qualities which a thing may alternatively possess
(253) or not possess while in all other respects remaining the same.
Of course, the introduction of the category of state, though ontologically it represents a new break in the rational perfection of the thing and even of the quality, is again indispensable if we wish to rationalize at least a part of the empirical processes on the ground of the static order of things. Now, the ontological state, like the ontological quality, possesses both the reality of the particular changing property within the situation and the generality of the idea of this property; it is objectively the same real state in all the things in which it may be found. But it does not simultaneously, or rather timelessly, coexist in various things; it may pass from thing to thing, and thus possesses a kind of concrete duration which is not merely the occupation of a certain period of pure time, but implies a becoming in the form of this very passage from thing to thing. In so far as a thing is subjected to certain states before or after other things, duration ceases to be completely external to it; the thing begins internally to participate in the duration of its states; it is becoming itself. Since, however, as a principle, a change of state is not supposed to affect the self-identity of the thing, its participation in concrete becoming is only superficial, is accidental, not essential to it. The passage of states from thing to thing appears as only a half-real becoming, a mh on, to use in this connection again the wonderfully expressive Platonic term, something that seems to be and yet rationally should not be. To make it completely real, it must be conceived as a manifestation of objectively real relations between things. A thing cannot acquire a new state by its own essence, but if the appearance of this new state is provoked from the outside by something that tends to disturb this essence, if it is a reaction to the action of another thing, it is in so far real even though, or rather because, the essence of the thing is not disturbed by it (Herbart). The action in this
(254) sense is, of course, itself a state of that other thing, appearing at a given moment of its existence. An empirically given state is ontologically real only if it is a link of a relation, either an action provoking a reaction or a reaction to an action. A modification of the content of an object which can be interpreted neither as determined by nor as determining another modification of the content of some other object is classed as merely subjective.
The ontological relation, real and affecting the thing, is thus a necessary supplement of the ontological state, and it is also indispensable if we want to take in some measure at least into account the modifications to which the content of the object is subjected in various connections. Thus, to the external and formal relations of space and time are added internal and material relations by which a thing is modified in its state under the influence of other things. These active, internal relations do not possess the real unity in plurality which is given by theoretic rationalization to qualities and states. In so far as real, a material relation between two things, manifested in a given action and reaction, is unique and particular, localized in space where the things are, localized in time as the respective states when they come to these particular things. A material relation between things in theoretic rationalization shares thus the uniqueness of the concrete active connection, without, of course, being treated any longer as the product of an act of thought. The very terms of action and reaction preserve the trace of the origin of this category in the actual determination of objects by human acts. But the physical relation is treated as real only in so far as it constitutes a determination of a state of one object by a state of another, just as vice versa a state is treated as real only if it is the link of a physical relation. Therefore the connection which lacks the reciprocity of determination implied in the principle of action and reaction, the actual connection by which only the content of one
(255) object is modified, is from the physical standpoint only subjective.
If now all these categories of the static rational order are only used as methodological presuppositions for the solution of specific scientific problems, and their ontological formulation is only a figure of speech meant to express nothing but the permanent form which a certain type of the rationalistic ideal preserves through all the variations of its content, then things, qualities, states, and relations simply supplement one another in the theoretic reconstruction of any particular fragment of reality. If, however, they are meant to express the universal objective order of reality as a whole, each one of them excludes the others and an ontology based on these categories is a set of contradictions.
Thus, we can isolate any single quality or any combination of qualities from the content of an object and treat it as one in many objects for the purposes and within the limits of a certain scientific problem without impairing the reality of these objects, because the concrete object has content enough for many qualitatively determined things and we cannot exhaust it in any theoretic system, however wide and complex the latter may be. But if we think of all the objects as being in themselves once and forever qualitatively determined things and of all the qualities that ever were and will be the ground of scientific analysis as objectively real, then the entire content of each thing will resolve itself into qualities and either isolated things or common qualities will be unreal, as is historically shown by the insoluble opposition of objective idealism and empiricism on this point.
Similarly, as long as we treat within a certain scientific investigation certain determinations of the object as changeless qualities, others as changing states, the changelessness of the former and the changeability of the latter are correlative and limited, qualities are bound to remain changeless and states are bound to change only with regard to each other
(256) and within the limits traced by the special problem of this investigation. But if we want all the determinations which ever have or will be treated as qualities to be qualities ontologically, there can be no states left; and if all those which have been or will be treated as states were states ontologically there would be no qualities. Either of these contradictory assumptions contradicts in turn the assumption of the reality of the things. The opposition between things and qualities has been formulated above; that between things and ontological states is equally clear. Suppose we have excluded qualities: then the thing will be analyzed into states, common to many things. The analysis is methodologically unobjectionable if reality is defined as the concrete historical reality, for no theoretic system can exhaust the total duration of a concrete object, and the latter will have always enough permanent existence left outside of the modifications which we have isolated as states. But if objects are rationally determinable things and if all their determinations which can ever be treated as states are states, the thing is completely decomposed into states, just as it was before decomposed into qualities.[3]
Both the ontological quality and the ontological state each separately excludes the other and excludes the thing. But they cannot exist without the thing; they have any significance at all only in so far as limiting the ontological absoluteness of the thing. A world of qualities is as impossible as a world of states. The knot of contradictions is already inextricable; and it becomes still more intricate when we introduce the ontological relation into reality in general. In the opposition between pluralism denying all
(257) objective realness of relations and monism rejecting all independent realness of things, qualities, and states, and melting them into one great whole of indefinitely complicated relations, the mutual exclusion of the relation and of the other ontological categories is historically manifest. If, indeed, a relation or group of relations is methodologically used to explain certain particular determinations of the concrete object, the object still preserves enough independence to be itself. But if, forgetting the limitation of all such explanations to a particular theoretic problem, we want to claim that all relations which have been or will be found objectively real and used to explain the empirical determinations of rational things, are ontologically real, then no state, no quality, and no thing can preserve its ontological reality. And since relations cannot exist by themselves, we reach an absolutely irrational mystical One, a Being which is identical with Non-Being.
The second type of the naturalistic ideal, that of a dynamic order of causally determined processes, is much simpler in its logical constitution. It implies, of course, a dynamization of things, properties, and relations, the first being conceived as empirical complexes of continuous processes, the second as general continuous processes more or less lasting, found in many complexes at once, the third as relations of functional dependence between elementary processes entering into different empirical complexes. By isolating causally related processes from empirical situations, theoretic rationalism makes causal relations independent of the specific organization imposed upon the situation by a system of schemes, and therefore absolute. Every process, elementary or complex, is thus taken to be a link of a causal series, necessarily determined by some other process, also elementary or complex, and itself in turn determining necessarily another elementary or complex process. There can be neither ä, beginning nor an end of the series, since the existence of the
(258) determination is not conditioned by anything. Space and time are only in so far necessary for the rational system of processes as this system tends to substitute itself for the system of things, and thus takes over such spatial and temporal problems as the latter involves. But by itself, the system of processes does not imply any definite conditions of extension and duration and therefore may be adequately expressed in terms of mathematical functions, substituting, of course, quantitative for qualitative determinations of particular processes and general types of processes. Anything in experience that is not a rationally determinable process, that appears either as a static thing, quality, state, relation, or as a concrete content or meaning, is in advance classed as subjective.
Here again the same distinction must be made as with regard to the application of the categorical order of things to reality. If the dynamic order of processes is used methodologically as a presupposition permitting the theoretic rationalization of any given natural becoming, it is perfectly justifiable, particularly since the static order of things does not permit us to attain the highest level of rationality in treating processes, even when it takes the latter into account as changes of states. It is thus a theoretically indispensable supplement of, often a substitute for, the methodological static order of things in treating special scientific problems. But when conceived ontologically as the ultimate and universal order of reality, it not only contradicts and excludes, by reducing it to subjectivity, the order of things, but also contradicts itself if we apply it to the total becoming of empirical reality in general. For causal explanation presupposes that the special form of the process which we want to explain already exists in experience. In the practical organization of reality it is determined in advance, and what we want to explain is only its appearance at a certain moment of the development of the concrete situation. In scientifi-
(259) -cally determined reality, in a perfect system of processes, it exists independently of duration and extension, and what we want to understand is only the causal relation between a process of this special form and other processes.
By implying the possibility of an indefinite repetition of a causal relation between processes of a certain type in space and time, the principle of causality implies an absolute existence, independent of space and time, of the types of these processes. And, clearly, the appearance of a new type of a process cannot be explained causally, for a new type of a process, like a new content, is an absolute addition to empirical reality, whereas the process as effect is equivalent in its reality to the process-cause, so much so that a branch of empirio-criticism has proposed to substitute the principle of equivalence for the principle of causality. The appearance of a new type in the effect would mean that the cause was not merely a process determining another process, but in some, however slight, measure a creative act. An agglomeration of processes, however long, could produce a new type, a new "essence," however insignificant, a new kind of qualitative change, for example, only if during every process a little reality appeared out of nothing, if in the effect there were a little more than in the cause—an assumption which contradicts the principle of causality.
The historical evolution of reality shows continually the appearance of new types of processes. Materialistic evolutionism itself must admit that the immense majority of the very processes found in the material world and now causally explained have appeared during evolution; most physical and chemical and all biological processes, according to its own doctrine, could not have existed in the original state of the material reality. But even putting materialistic metaphysics concerning the genesis of the pre-cultural world aside, at every moment we find new absolute beginnings of new forms of processes—in industry, in our own organic activities, in
(260) social life. Of course, materialistic evolutionism will not stop in its causal explanation when it finds a new form of a process started by conscious beings. It will search in the organism and back again in the inorganic material environment for the causes of the process. But this is ignoring the problem.
The whole point is not that a process of a definite formally ready kind appeared at a certain time and place, but that a type of processes which did not exist before appeared in practical experience. Once we have accepted creative activity as the source of practical situations within which processes are found, the problem is perfectly clear. A new modification is created by a new act, stabilized and objectivated in a repeatable situation, and once objectivated, becomes a content with a definite practical meaning—a new concrete object which, like all objects, grows in reality as part of concrete experience and may even be given and enter into practical systems as an object, without being reconstructed again by activity. This development can often be followed almost to its end in the automatization of bodily activities. It may be shortened by creating a process as a real object with the help of instruments, as when a movement, first consciously performed by man, becomes a part of the dynamic organization of a machine.
Now, all this evolution of new processes is incomprehensible on the ground of the ontological principle of causality. For the purpose of a particular scientific investigation, nomothetic science can help itself out by the assumption that a certain specific process which it is investigating is not really new in its essence, but is a combination of simpler processes, each of them old and known in its form. But this assumption has no validity when applied to the world in general. For as long as we deal with one or a few processes and are interested only in reducing these to old and known elementary causal series, we can ignore the fact that, when the process is thus analyzed into a combination of old processes,
(261) the novelty of its type is not explained but only changes its logical character, so that instead of a new type of process we have a new form of the combination of processes. But this fact cannot be ignored when we claim to treat in the same way the total becoming of reality.
Suppose that we have succeeded in analyzing all the processes of the world into combinations of a limited number of eternal, or rather untemporal, types of processes. First of all, we shall be forced then to put into the subjective, psychological field all the empirical side of these supposed combinations of processes, all the "appearance" of novelty and simplicity which these assumedly complex combinations of old processes present in experience. For instance, if we want to reduce all processes to combinations of movements, the empirical content of chemical changes, of changes of lights and colors, of sound, smell, and taste, etc., become "subjective. " And even then, the ontological problem still remains unsolved and causal evolutionism still contradicts itself; for there remains always to explain the new real foundations which correspond to these new subjective data, the appearance of new forms of combinations of the eternal elementary processes. The formula of the problem is changed, but the problem remains as insoluble as ever.
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ORDER
The order assumed by the naturalistic variation of the theoretic ideal is not only the oldest and the most firmly established in knowledge, but also its various aspects have been most thoroughly and consistently developed, and the specific tendency of theoretic systematization of reality, the tendency to neglect in so far as can be done the preexisting practical organization, has here found its most radical expression. In other branches of knowledge, the theoretic ideal is as yet less definite. There are still many problems to solve as to the form of this ideal in each group of sciences,
(262) and we hope that the attention of logic and methodology will be turned in the future rather to the elaboration of these other indispensable and practically most important but badly neglected forms of theoretic rationalization of reality than to the continual perfectioning of the naturalistic ideal. But as such a special elaboration is not within the scope of the present sketch, we shall limit ourselves to pointing out a few general questions concerning the presuppositions of each of these non-naturalistic orders and their relations to the naturalistic order and to one another.
The naturalistic order itself implies, as we have seen, the existence of "subjective" representations, images, data of consciousness, or whatever else we may call them; indeed, it can be maintained at all in application to empirical reality only under the condition that everything which does not comply with it is excluded from "material" reality and put among these immaterial psychological phenomena. In this way, a psychological domain is erected outside of the physical domain and grows in wealth with the growing rigorousness and simplicity of the material order, which forces us to treat more and more empirical data as subjective.
It is impossible to put clearly the problem of the theoretic rational order of the psychological domain without having first excluded two most important and in a measure contradictory errors which have been made, and are only too often still made in interpreting psychological reality. First of all, it cannot be sufficiently emphasized that the psychological domain is originally only a theoretically separated part of the empirical reality, a part which is indeed only negatively determined, since it includes everything which is left over from materialistic systematization, but which even in this purely negative original determination does not include all the empirical world outside of material nature, but only all reality outside of material nature. It does not therefore include active thought, which manifestly cannot
(263) belong to any order of reality whatever but possesses an entirely different order of its own, and has neither more nor less connection with physical reality than with psychological reality. Meanwhile, because psychological reality by opposition to physical nature is classed as "subjective," that is, as limited to the sphere of experience of an individual, and because the same individual to whom these "subjective," "psychological" determinations of reality are ascribed is also a source of activity, we find a relatively early identification of the "subject" as sphere and receptacle of psychological, physically unreal experiences, and the "subject" as source of activity. There were, of course, also other factors active in the history of this identification which we cannot follow here; but the identification once achieved, we have the peculiar problem of the subject-object dualism, which in the history of human thought belongs to the same class as the squaring of the circle or perpetuum mobile. On the one side there is the physical nature, self-existing and purely real; on the other side the subject, a receptacle of all experiences which are not nature, and a source of all activities.
But here the problem does not stop. On the objective side, together with nature, all other kinds of rational objective reality are put—the state, the system of theoretic ideas, religious trans-material realities, etc. — for each of them, just as material nature, leaves irrational remnants for which realism finds no other place than the subject. And on the side of the subject, since the latter is taken to be a source of activities and activities deal not only with experiences that do not conform with the objective order, but also and in the same line with such as do conform with it, such empirical data as are already included in the objective order become also put into the subjective sphere, together with experiences excluded from the objective order; and the subject becomes thus a receptacle for all experiences. And then an interesting antinomy begins. For, on the one hand, the totality of
(264) the objective orders includes the individual subjects themselves whose consciousnesses, connected with their bodies, appear as determined in all their parts by objective reality, and on the other hand the individual subjects include and determine by their consciousnesses the objective reality. Either of these two opposite standpoints can be developed philosophically with equal consistency, but neither can be reduced to the other, and their reconciliation is impossible.
If, indeed, philosophy accepts the affirmation that all objects are dependent on consciousness as included in it, then necessarily consciousness, as condition of everything else, becomes absolute. The world is then dissolved into mere data of consciousness, and the objects and objective orders must be reconstructed from these data and their subjective connections. All depends then, evidently, on the question how we conceive the data of consciousness and their connections. We may completely neglect the specific character of individual consciousness as it appears when opposed in theoretic reflection to the objective world, and simply treat as datum of consciousness everything just as it is given, with all its relatively subjective or relatively objective characteristics. We reach then the philosophy of "immanence." But the whole significance of the subjectivistic view is drawn from the specific character of the subjectively given objects and connections as against the objective world; if the subjective experiences and the objective world together, with all their specific characters, are equally immanent in consciousness, the concept of immanence loses all significance, becomes an empty qualification of all and everything. The theory of universal immanence cannot be overcome by any arguments, not because it is rationally perfect, but because it is rationally meaningless.
Suppose now we want to preserve all the specific char-
(265) -acters of subjectivity as individual subjectivity, we evidently cannot deduce the objective world as it is given to the individual along with and opposed to his consciousness, from this very consciousness. We can only deny this objective world and treat it as a mere appearance, as an illusion of the individual subject. This is pure solipsism, which is as invincible rationally as the philosophy of universal immanence, though for different reasons: it simply refuses to accept any premises which would make a discussion possible, since any discussion whatever demands the recognition of some ground transcending individual consciousness.
Much more productive philosophically was the middle way of objective idealism, in which the effort was made to deduce the objective world from consciousness by conceiving consciousness as bearing in itself sufficient foundations of objectivity without ceasing to be the subject, though no longer the individual subject. In this class we find the Fichtean absolute Ego and the Kantian transcendental unity of apperception, the concept of a social consciousness as sum or as resultant of individual consciousnesses, and finally the phenomenalistic doctrine of a world of data from which the principle of consciousness is excluded but which has the same formal character as the succession of data in individual experience viewed in the act of self-reflection, only without the limitation in extension of individual experience.
But in spite of the undoubted importance which this method had in provoking philosophical productivity, it shares the weakness of all half-solutions. Whereas at first glance it seems to unify the opposite viewpoints, on closer investigation it proves to have simply divided the difficulties which separate them and thus made the opposition less conspicuous. As far, indeed, as the super-individual consciousness transcends the individual either by its absolute rationality, as in the Kantian and Fichtean idealism, or by its extension, as in the sociological and phenomenalistic conception of the individual must take toward it the same attitude as toward the objective world, and we have the same antinomy as before,
(266) only with a more limited application. And on the other hand, in so far as the super-individual consciousness preserves some subjectivity, our reflection about it must conceive it in the same way as it conceives the individual subject, as dependent on the same objective world which we try to deduce from it, but transcending it either by the incalculable richness of its content—in transcendental or absolute idealism —or by the perfection of its form—in theories which try to reduce rational objectivity to social objectivity or logical order to associative order. And the antinomy repeats itself once more.
If, on the contrary, philosophy in developing its systems tries to remain on purely objective ground, then consistently it is the objective world which becomes an Absolute. And the development of problematization becomes almost exactly parallel to that which we see in subjectivism. The pantheistic inclusion of the individual subject with all its characteristics in an absolute objective unity is a perfect counterpart of the doctrine of immanence and leaves, like the latter, the real problem completely untouched. More important historically than (on the subjective side) solipsism, though not less one-sided, is the essential tendency of post-Socratic philosophy to exclude in some way the fact that the character and order of all elements constituting the objective world vary when these elements are given in the individual process of experience, and vary even from individual to individual and from moment to moment. This tendency leads to a division of the entire world into a positive side, representing the objective absolute order, and a negative side, representing a mere disturbance of this order by the individual subject; this negative side is treated then as unworthy or incapable of being investigated, precisely because it is supposed to involve no positive order, all positive order belonging by definition to the objective world. A modern expression of the same tendency is found in radical materialism and its
(267) treatment of consciousness as "epiphenomenon," only this doctrine is incomparably narrower than the ancient doctrines were, because in the materialistic conception the objective world itself has been deprived of most of its content.
The deduction of the subject from the object brings with it again the original antinomy, though in a somewhat different form. The subject, being entirely the product of the objective world, is by the very essence a "subject for the object," that is, can and must be only a perfectly adequate subjective counterpart of the objective reality; otherwise we should necessarily come to the conclusion that the objective reality, being experienced by an inadequate subject, is in fact a subjective world. Meanwhile, the subject supposed produced by the objective world is precisely the individual, limited, and imperfect subject, distorting the objective reality in the process of his experience. This was, for example, the paradox of the doctrine of divine creation: God created men to understand and glorify him and to be happy, and men were essentially incapable of understanding him, with the rare exception of a few saints unwilling to glorify him, and mostly condemned to wretchedness. Quite analogous is the paradox of modern evolutionism: individual consciousness has developed exclusively as instrument of adaptation to objective reality, and it is quite unadapted to objective reality, leading all the time human beings, with the rare exception of a few modern scientists, to various absurd notions about reality and to a very irrational behavior. And if we try to avoid the paradox by putting some intermediary link between the individual and the objective world, a rôle which in the doctrine of creation was played by the religious system connecting man with God and in the doctrine of natural evolution by the scientific systems through which the individual can understand the world and adapt himself to it, then our paradox repeats itself twice on a smaller scale, since the individual is not perfectly adapted to the system of religion or science and the
(268) system of religion or science is not perfectly adapted to its supernatural or natural object.
Finally, it is evident that, once we have opposed subject and object to each other as ultimate principles of the empirical world, any common principle to which we want to reduce them must both transcend experience, since we treat the process of experience as essentially subjective, and be irrational, since rationality belongs according to our premises essentially to the objective side of the world. We reach thus such conceptions as the "One" of Plotinus, the "Will" of Schopenhauer, the "Life" of Bergson, essences whose cognition demands some mysterious act of ecstasy, direct apprehension, or intuition, in which subject and object become unified, while the real problem is left as it was. For not only can we not understand how subject and object evolve out of this mystical essence, but when they are already there, the old antinomy reappears, since their common trans-empirical and irrational ground does not change anything at all in their reciprocal relations within the given world. The most consistent is the solution of Hegel, who simply accepted both the traditional opposition of subject and object and the necessity of having them reunited, and postulated this reunion as a continuous alternative passage from one to another; but such a solution of the problem is evidently only a formulation of its insolubility.
The conception of the subject as opposed to the objective world can have thus no ontological significance, though it is perfectly justified methodologically. In other words, there are no phenomena essentially belonging to the subjective domain as against others essentially belonging to the objective domain, but when studying any fragment whatever of the concrete world as possessing a certain order we can always make a separation between certain sides of objects or thoughts, which from the standpoint of this order are treated as objective, existing or subsisting in accordance with the
(269) given order, whereas other sides of the same concrete objects of thoughts may be qualified as subjective relatively to the first and from the same standpoint.
There may be therefore as many different ways of separating empirical phenomena into subjective and objective as there are possible theoretic orders of the objective world; the psychological subject which we obtain by excluding from real objects and connections everything which does not fit into the physical order, is only one of these methodological conceptions and has nothing in common with any conception that might be formed on the ground of a theory of thought by excluding from the domain of objective thought all acts which do not fit into a certain logical order.
And if instead of starting with the physical order of reality we assumed, for instance, the social order of reality as fundamental, our conception of the subject would be also that of a subject of experience, not of a subject of thoughts, but it would be entirely different from the one which has historically developed. This historical development was almost entirely due to the fact that human knowledge started with material nature and reached the highest degree of perfection in studying material nature, so that the psychological domain, originally defined by opposition to the physical order, has remained fundamentally the domain of personal experiences as opposed to natural reality; the one special conception of the methodological subject which has been formed from the naturalistic standpoint has absorbed, so to speak, all other possible conceptions of a subject of experiences, though not perhaps those of a subject of thoughts.
Of course, the psychological domain as long as only negatively determined by opposition to the natural world has neither definite limits, since it is simply all reality that is nut physical, nor a definite form, since it is simply defined as not possessing the physical form. But the theoretic ideal of perfect rationality of the world compels us to give an internal
(270) limitation and a rational form to this remnant of the physical reality, which is in fact much wider and richer than the physical reality itself, and that is what we do in psychological theory.
It is precisely in psychological theory, in the attempts to introduce scientifically a rational order into the psychological domain as a special domain of reality, that we meet the second fundamental error concerning the character of this domain. This error consists in applying to psychological phenomena principles created in constructing the order of material nature, and in trying to incorporate the totality of these phenomena into that very nature from which they have been excluded, so as to attain a monistic view of reality. As we have seen, the only justification of the assumption that there is a duality of psychological "representations," "perceptions," "remembrances, " "associations," etc., on the one hand and material nature on the other hand is precisely the impossibility of including the whole concrete empirical reality in the physical order, the necessity of cutting off a part of it; the psychological phenomena are not excluded because they are distinct by their essence from the rest, but they are treated as distinct by their essence because they are excluded from the physical order. Being a receptacle of all that seems irrational from the standpoint of the naturalistic principles, the psychological field evidently cannot be rationalized with the help of these very principles. This is so clear that even the most radical naturalism never tried to apply its rationalistic presuppositions to psychological phenomena taken directly as individual experiences. But it failed and still fails to notice the contradiction when it goes at this problem indirectly, by substituting for each psychological phenomenon something to which formally one of the categories used with reference to the material world could be applied; and it does not see that in this case either the irrationality seemingly removed from each psychological phenomenon in particular will continue
(271) to exist in the connection between these phenomena, or if these connections become rationalized, the system of reality thus obtained does not correspond any longer to the psychological domain, but to something entirely different. This is precisely what happens when psychology, instead of taking as object-matter the psychological phenomenon itself, the "subjective datum," that is, that which is given to the individual, that object or connection which the individual experiences but which cannot be incorporated into the natural order, begins to study the fact of the appearance of this datum in individual consciousness. It substitutes then for a certain experience as the individual himself perceives it, the occurrence of a certain experiencing as the theorist who observes this individual reconstructs it.
This occurrence, this "psychological fact," is then categorized either as a state or as a process. The difference between these two categories, which at first seems to be, as in the material world, only a difference between a static and a dynamic view of the psychological reality, has here still other logical consequences. For a state is essentially the state of something and therefore the use of this category implies the assumption of a psychological consciousness which, even if it is not defined as a "soul," as a substance of which those states are the modi, even if it is supposed entirely exhausted in its reality by its states and existing only in them, is nevertheless a basis of unity of all its states, is at least a common field, an empty receptacle for all of them. On the ground of this concept, all the facts of experiencing which the observer finds "in" the given individual belong together as states of this individual's consciousness, and only this consciousness as a whole belongs to the objective world. But the consciousness as a whole is evidently an absolutely irrational chaos, since it is merely a projection of the total individual sphere of experience and reflection upon the screen of naturalistic categories, without
(272) even that order which the individual at least partially constructs within his sphere; for this order as realized by the individual within the empirical chaos of his experience appears indeed as existing and objectively real to the experiencing and acting individual himself, who knows nature only from his experience and reflection and for whom there is no other objectivity than the one he produces or reproduces, but it does not exist from the standpoint of the psychologist who observes this individual's experiencing and for whom this individual's reflection is not an objectively valid activity constructing or reconstructing an objective rational order, but merely a plurality of psychological states. The irrationality remains, of course, exactly the same if instead of states of consciousness we interpret facts of experiencing as states of the individual organism.
The concept of the psychological process can, indeed, escape this difficulty, for the process is a self-sufficient ontological category and does not have to be made dependent on the existence of a common entity—a soul or consciousness. But here another and in a sense an opposite difficulty presents itself. For if conscious processes as processes of experience do not belong together as mere modifications of one consciousness or one body, they must belong together on some other ground. Otherwise there would be no reason and no possibility for a science of the psychological reality as distinct from the rest of reality. A process of experiencing would have a significance only in connection with the experienced object; the introduction of this concept would correspond not to a distinction between "objective" and "subjective" phenomena, but merely to the fact that, besides the individual's having certain phenomena given to him, somebody else (or this individual himself when retrospectively reflecting about it) is aware, as social observer, of these phenomena being given to this individual, and is aware of it as of an occurrence happening in connection with some other occurrences
(273) within that part of empirical reality which is given to him, the observer. In order to give these processes the significance of elements of a specific psychological reality, it is indispensable that one conceive them both as interconnected and as at the same time distinct from other processes.
But this is clearly impossible. For the only way in which they can be interconnected is by being referred to, dynamically centralized around, the same individual. Such a centralization of real processes implies that the individual must be a real object to which processes converge from other objects and from which they emanate to other objects. He cannot be a consciousness, for then these processes would become states of consciousness; he can be only a body. But what processes can there be centralized as psychological around the body? Evidently not the processes going on in the material environment of the body, since these are already classed as natural processes. Can they be the organic processes ? The naturalistic schools which first tried to reduce psychological phenomena to processes of organic adaptation accepted this idea. But the organic processes are not what we mean when we think of the processes of experiencing. On the contrary, when the facts of experiencing are conceived as states of consciousness, the psychologist takes into account the organic processes of biological adaptation as going on alongside states of consciousness and always accompanying them; this is the well-known psycho-physiological parallelism. Unless then the processes of experiencing are kept as "epiphenomena," which means simply a recognition of their irrationality and a denial of any real or ideal connection between them and the material natural order, they have simply disappeared as a consequence of the attempt to rationalize them, without leaving anything instead as object-matter. And besides, if we should interpret experiencing as a biological adaptation between the individual organism and his environment, it is quite illogical to conceive it as a
(274) process. There are no processes going on between the organism and the environment; there are only relations between organic processes and processes going on in the environment. The organism from the standpoint of the dynamic natural order is a set of continuous processes; a phenomenon of, biological adaptation is the causal determination of an organic process by an extra-organic process or vice versa. A certain science is, of course, free to study such relations between organic and extra-organic processes instead of studying psychological phenomena, that is, experiences as given to the experiencing individual. But such a science is not psychology; it is a part of biology. The behavioristic school does good work in studying organic behavior instead of conscious data; but this does not mean that it reduces psychology to a study of behavior, but that it has left the field of psychology to other schools and gone over into the biological field.[4]
The exclusion of certain phenomena as psychological from the domain of material nature was, as we have seen, due to the implicit assumption of the naturalistic method that reality is constituted by objects and connections uniformly determined in accordance with the same perfect rational order and that therefore we can study them while ignoring the variety of actively constructed situations in which they become determined. It is consequently evident that, if we meet phenomena which do not fit into the natural order, it is either because these phenomena are not rationally determined at all, or because their rational determination differs from that
(275) which is assumed as common to all objects or connections of the naturalistic type and requires therefore the reconstruction of the situation for its adequate understanding. The conception that any phenomena are not rationally determined at all is opposed to the rationalistic ideal of every science; therefore a science which wants to study those phenomena which naturalism rejects must decide for the second part of the alternative and consider these phenomena as fully apt to be theoretically rationalized under the condition of having the situations to which they belong theoretically reconstructed. Such a science will then put upon situations the same claim of perfect rationality which naturalistic science puts upon objects, ignoring again that most of the situations are rationally imperfect and that those which approach perfection owe this to the organizing schematic activity.
In fact, every particular psychological problem which we state, not in terms of states or processes but in terms of individual experiences, is a problem of situations instead of being a problem of objects. What we ask ourselves when we investigate individual experience, not as integral part of the natural world but as divergent from the natural world, specifically personal, belonging to the actual sphere of this particular individual, is not "What is this reality?" but "How does this individual at this moment experience this reality and why does he experience it as he does?" This implies the well-known empirical statement that a certain reality can be experienced differently at different moments and by different individuals. But we cannot accept for scientific purposes the whole enormous complexity of the concrete, non-rationalized empirical world, which would force us to admit first that there is not a single individual experience identical to another and that the explanation of the individual's actually experiencing a certain reality in a certain way must be sought in the total sphere of this individual's experience, past and present. If we want to rationalize
(276) personal experiences theoretically, we must search first for some objective similarities between some of these experiences at least, which would permit us to generalize them in some measure, to ignore their variations within certain objectively determinable limits, and yet to take enough of these variations into account to justify the distinction between the uniformly determined natural reality and its personal aspects. We must have, secondly, more or less rational and objectively determinable, limited sections of personal experience to which we could refer particular experiences of an individual and thus explain the particular aspects which a certain reality assumes for this individual at this particular moment without being forced to take his entire concrete personality into consideration.
The situation—which may not be perfectly in harmony with the demands of the natural order, but which nevertheless is in some degree rational—gives us both a ground for the generalization and a ground for the explanation of personal experiences. A reality is supposed to assume similar aspects in similar situations, and if it has a certain aspect for the given individual at the given moment, it is because it is determined for his actual experience by some actual situation of which it is a part. Therefore whenever similar situations are found, we expect similar experiences of given reality, and, on the contrary, in different situations we expect different aspects of this reality to appear. Vice versa, whenever we find similar experiences of a reality, we assume the existence of similar situations, whereas different experiences of the same reality point to the existence of different situations. The objective natural reality—thing, property, relation, process—viewed from the psychological standpoint, does not bear in its self-identity a sufficient or even a necessary condition of being always and by everybody experienced in the same way; nor is an objective difference of natural realities sufficient to guarantee a general and permanent
(277) difference of their representations. To make the first experienced in a similar way and the second in a different way, we must have them included in similar situations; in the contrary case the self-identity of the first may result in a nonidentity of representations, and the very difference of the second may lead to an identity of their aspects.
To heighten the rationality of its order, psychology implicitly or explicitly assumes that in a certain measure similar situations and similar experiences are perfectly identical, and in repeated laboratory experiments tries to approach this identity as far as empirically possible by artificially and systematically isolating a certain situation from concrete experience, and at the same time varies situations in definite ways so as to obtain a more exact definition of the corresponding variations of experiences. Wherever it cannot create identical and stable situations experimentally, it constructs them by abstraction, implicitly ignoring or explicitly excluding such personal variations as can have no scientific significance at the given stage of psychological systematization. It constructs thus analytically, as a theory of psychological elements, classes of experiences corresponding to definite realities and reconstructs out of these elements synthetically, as a theory of psychological complexes, classes of situations which by their specific forms are supposed to determine the ways in which certain groups of realities are experienced. Of course all this work is no longer a reconstruction of the original practical situations, but of situations qualified as psychological by the assumption of an existing natural reality to which all experiences are supposed to refer.
But besides this static order of psychology there is a dynamic psychological order possible, leading, just as does the dynamic order of nature, to a determination of causal laws. In the dynamic order of nature the original elements are modifications of objects as against the static natural order of which the original elements are the objects themselves.
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A parallel difference can be found between the static and the dynamic orders in psychology. The former bears upon the data of individual experience as distinct from natural things; its original materials, the concrete object-matter upon which it draws, are contents of objects. The static order ignores the meaning as such; if it has to take into account the difference between the natural relation of a thing to other things and the connection which the individual establishes between this thing as object of his experience and other objects, it either treats this connection as a relation which the thing acquires in the personal situation in which it is given, or if this cannot be done, it turns the meaning into a content and treats it as an aspect of the thing in personal experience. The first happens, for instance, when we distinguish the order of "apperception" of objects in personal experience from their natural order; the second, when we treat the emotional meaning which objects acquire by their connection with a whole personal organization of life as an emotional content attached to these objects by the individual.
The psychological experience as such when statically rationalized can have no meaning, for it is inclosed and already determined within a situation. But without meaning there can be no dynamic order of personal experience, for only in so far as an object has a meaning for the individual can it have an active influence upon other objects of his experience. A psychological datum does not lead to any modifications of other data. And it is impossible that natural reality should influence psychological becoming; physical objects cannot be the causes of psychological effects, since they are objective standards with which psychological experiences do or do not comply, depending on personal situations. A physical object could influence dynamically psychological objects only if, by becoming itself a psychological object, it brought a meaning with it into the psychological domain; but physical objects have no meanings. In order therefore
(279) to have a rational order of psychological becoming, we must have somewhere objects which are at the same time determined rationally by situations—for only then they can be psychologically rational data-and are nevertheless dynamic concrete historical objects with meanings.
Now, such objects can be only social. The social object is determined as element of situations, but of many situations constructed and reconstructed again and again in the experience of many individuals; in so far as determined within each situation, it is a thing; in so far as varying in fact from individual to individual and still the same, it is a historical object and the fact of its actually being connected all the time with various other objects gives it a meaning; it opens possibilities and suggestions of acts which neither the psychological datum nor the natural things can do. We shall return to this question. The fact is that objects can have meanings for psychologically conceived individuals, can suggest changes of psychological phenomena as such only if they are social; only the social reality which, though objectively determined, is still dynamic, can exercise an influence upon psychological reality. A dynamic psychology, searching for laws of psychological becoming, must be a social psychology.
The psychological problem is here no longer started by the divergence of content between individual experience and the objectively fixed material nature, but by the divergence between the meaning which an object has in the experience of one individual and that which it possesses for other individuals. Of course, the implicit or explicit assumption is that the object has for the individual the meaning it has, because the individual connects it with certain other objects and determines it with reference to them as an element of a definite situation. Therefore the difference or similarity of the influence which it has upon the personal experience of various members of the group depends upon the difference
(280) or similarity of the situations into which they introduce it, which they accept as the ground of its determination. Individual acceptance or non-acceptance of a certain situation with its consequences as to the determination of objects is psychologically not to be explained, for it would demand a complete reconstruction of individual past; we simply find the situation accepted, and this is a fundamental psychological fact. From the standpoint of this acceptance, the fact of having a certain meaning given to an object, a meaning conditioned by the situation into which the object is being introduced, becomes itself a psychological occurrence, a personal attitude taken toward this object.
The attitude toward the object, being dependent upon the constructed and accepted situation, a modification of the situation by the introduction of some new object or group of objects will change the attitude and produce a new attitude instead. Assuming now classes of identically defined situations common to a given social group and socially common objects, social values determined by these situations, we can always say what objects have to be brought to (or excluded from) a given situation as accepted by the individual in order to produce another definite situation; we can say what social values have to be used to influence the individual at the time in order to change a given attitude into another definite attitude. On the ground of the general tendency of the rationalistic ideal which consists in searching in the given field of reality for the order which we find in the most perfect instances of systematic organization, we shall presuppose, as a methodological principle, that all attitudes are conditioned by perfect situations and every situation belongs to a socially uniform and once and forever determinable class, so that the appearance of every attitude can be explained on the ground of some pre-existing attitude by the influence of some social value (or group of social values) which have changed the old into the new situation. Thus, we have the
(281) formal basis for laws of psychological becoming whose general formula is not, as in natural causality, constituted by two elements, a process determined in its appearance by another process, but of three members, an attitude determined in its appearance by a pre-existing attitude and a social value.[5]
On the ground of these laws, the psychological evolution of an individual or of a race may be reconstructed as a dynamic synthesis of situations taken in the course of their construction, though, of course, psychological laws, just as physical laws, can account only for the appearance in a certain sphere of psychological reality of attitudes and social values which have already existed in experience, not for the creation of new ones, which have to be treated as mere accidental results of combinations of the old or as approximate repetitions of the old. Psychology cannot reconstruct the concrete development of psychological experience in general any more than natural science can explain the concrete development of natural reality in general.
And psychology, which must presuppose for the purposes of its theoretic systematization a perfect uniformity of analogous situations from moment to moment and from individual to individual, must also ignore, as we have seen, cases in which the order which it presupposes does not exist. It must be therefore supplemented by some other science, just as it has itself supplemented the sciences of material nature. Its own partial success in rationalizing phenomena which natural science could not rationalize has proved due to the fact that it took objects within the situations in which they are determined and which the physical order ignores. Since all order of objects is due to situations, psychology can go
(282) back to the practical origin of the natural order in individual experience and explain thus why in certain cases individual experience harmonizes with the scientifically postulated order of natural things or processes, whereas in other cases it does not. Though from the naturalistic standpoint explanation seems needed only in cases of disagreement between individual experience and the natural order, yet this explanation would be impossible except on a ground which permits us to explain also cases of agreement. In the same way, if we want to supplement psychology in cases which it cannot handle because they lack the required order, we must have a standpoint which would permit us also to understand the origin of cases which it does handle because they do present the expected order. But no science of reality can understand the absolute origin of any rational order from a complete or partial empirical chaos, since every science of reality must presuppose the order which it postulates ready and existing in its most perfect form. Only a theory of activity can explain the gradual genesis of any type of order from concrete historical reality. On the ground of the sciences of reality, to explain the origin of an order can only mean to explain the rational organization of the systems in which this order is manifested as a result of their determination by some wider and more comprehensive system of which they are a part.
This shows that it would be a fundamental error to try to supplement rational psychology with its implicit or explicit postulates of a certain perfect order by some more vague and more subtle kind of psychological investigation which would reject all presuppositions of perfect uniformity of psychological data, attitudes, and situations, and try to describe as exactly as possible individual phenomena in their original variety. Such a descriptive psychology, provided it did not, as frequently happens in such circumstances, introduce unconsciously postulates as far-reaching as those
(283) on which psychological generalizations are now based, could be only either literature or a mere preparation of materials, which scientific psychology would then use according to its own methodological presuppositions.
THE SOCIOLOGICAL ORDER
The only way in which problems left aside by psychology can be made the object-matter of another science is by taking into account the dependence of situations on schemes. All uniformity of situations being the product of their schematic determination, the empirical existence or non-existence of that regularity of individual experiences and attitudes which psychology must postulate can be rationally explained instead of being simply accepted as given only if we interpret each particular case as a result of the empirical realization of schemes. Of course, in order to make our explanation rational for cases in which the required order is not present, we must make use of the supposition that different schemes when simultaneously realized in a certain section of experience interfere with each other. This supposition is parallel to that of physical science which assumes that, when certain causal series are simultaneously developing in a certain section of experience, they interfere with each other and none of the respective causal laws are directly manifested in experience. The difference between the applications of the principle of interference to reality when treated as natural and selfdetermined, and to reality when taken as consciously human and determined actively by practical schemes, consists in the fact that a natural law when interfered with by another law is supposed to be fully realized nevertheless, but in combination with the interfering law, whereas if two schemes interfere with each other, this means that neither of them is actually realized except in so far as the interfering one permits. However, in spite of this difference, the principle of interference permits us to assume that all individual
(284) situations are perfectly determined by schemes, though in particular cases a situation may be subjected to the common determination. of several schemes and thus present an accidental mixture of incomplete organizations, each of which would conform perfectly with the schematic type if it could be completed and were not stopped on the way by the interference of the others.
Since psychology has already put situations on the ground of particularized personal experience as opposed to the general natural world instead of taking them as they originally are, that is, within the concrete empirical world of historical reality, this new rational order of schemes by which the psychological order of situations must be supplemented becomes defined theoretically with reference and in opposition to particularized personal experience, and it is not a direct reconstruction of practical schemes as superimposed upon the historical becoming of the total of concrete experience. In other terms, this new extra-psychological reality is as relative to the psychological reality as the latter is to physical reality. It is the specific reality which is common to psychologically differentiated and isolated individuals—common not because composed of self-existing trans-psychological things or processes, but because determined by super-individual schemes. In a word, it is the social reality.[6]
It seems hardly necessary to develop here at great length the arguments showing the necessary independence of the
(285) social order from both the psychological and the physical orders. The very fact that there are schemes in empirical life guarantees a specific object-matter to social theory in so far as the latter is the only science of reality which does deal with practical schemes determining practical situations uniformly for various individuals and at various moments. And it is clear that a science which reconstructs reality as a rational order of schemes cannot be identified with or subordinated to a science which reconstructs it as a rational order of situations or of things.
Furthermore, since a social order, super-individual and yet working within individually diversified and psychologically isolated spheres of personal experience, must be admitted, precisely so as to allow us to understand phenomena for which personal experience in its psychological limitation offers no sufficient ground of explanation, it is self-contradictory to reduce the social to the psychological and vice versa. We can indeed abstractly conceive society as a synthesis of psychological individuals just as we can conceive the psychological individual as synthesis of social schemes—laws, customs, mores, religious, intellectual and aesthetic beliefs, economic institutions, technical traditions, etc. But in either case we lose from sight the very condition without which neither particular psychological nor particular social phenomena can be the object-matter of science: the existence of both a specifically social and a specifically psychological order. By conceiving society as a synthesis of psychological individuals we preclude the possibility of a rational solution of all particular problems which can be solved only with the help of common social schemes acting in and through individuals and yet existing independently of each of them. By conceiving the individual as synthesis of social schemes, we preclude the possibility of the solution of all those problems in which the continuity of personal life or the uniformity of experiences in all conscious individuals independent of the
(286) social groups to which they belong are the necessary presuppositions.
Finally, it is perfectly clear that we cannot divide or classify empirical phenomena into such as are by their ontological essence psychological and such as are essentially ontologically social, since every phenomenon can be treated from either of the two standpoints. In general the problem of the relation between the psychological and the social, if put on the ground of an absolute ontological distinction between these two domains, is as insoluble as the problem of the ontological relation between the natural reality as the "object" and the psychological "subject," and leads to similar contradictions. But as a methodological distinction of two different rational orders, with no limits of application traced a priori, but each used whenever in a particular case it helps better than the other to attain the rationalistic ideal of science, the separation of the psychological and the social is as indispensable as that of the physical and of the psychological.
In this field, however, the battle has been fought and won by the very progress of positive sociological investigations. More dangerous seems to be the position of the sociological method when it meets the traditional self-assertion of naturalism. Indeed, when viewed from the standpoint of the psychologically isolated personality, the social seems to share with the natural its super-individual, trans-psychological character. Thence the easy temptation to reduce it to the natural by assuming that whatever in the individual's psychology transcends the limits of personal experience or individually developed behavior has its source either in the biological continuity of the race or in the natural environment, and that the super-individual social order is thus reducible to the co-operation of common racial features and geographical influences.
If we omit here the metaphysical problem of inherited active tendencies, which belongs in the philosophy of activity,
(287) and limit ourselves to the empirical aspect of the question as concerning the order of social reality, the error of these naturalistic claims is perfectly evident. The objectivity of biological or geographical phenomena is an objectivity of things and processes; the objectivity of social phenomena is an objectivity of rules. The former, that is, the individual's own organism and its natural environment, are supra-personal as given materials and instruments of personal activity which he can use efficiently for his aims only by taking into account their pre-existing real characters. The latter, social institutions of all kinds, are supra-personal because they impose a definite form upon personal activity and compel the individual to choose definite aims and to select definite materials and instruments for their realization.
Therefore there is and can be no correspondence whatever between the biological or geographical order or their combination on the one hand and the social order on the other. The same race in the same geographic conditions develops the most heterogeneous forms of social organization at different periods of its historical existence; different races in different or in similar geographic environments show both similar and different institutions without any regularity whatever. Of course, the question of the nature of the materials and instruments given to activity may and usually does condition the selection of those schemes from among the given ones which permit the group to organize activity most efficiently for the accepted purposes and under the given conditions, and such relatively most efficient schemes are apt to be perpetuated and developed; but the character of the social schemes from among which the selection is made is no more determined by natural conditions than is the artistic style of a painting determined by its object-matter. And even independently of those self-evident philosophical considerations, frond the standpoint of a purely empirical scientific method a sociology which, on the ground of a few approximate parallelisms
(288) between certain natural conditions and certain social forms, speaks of the natural, that is causal, determination of social organization by biological or geographical factors, leaving aside all the "exceptions," which are incomparably more numerous than these facts which seem to corroborate the supposition and are entirely inexplicable on the naturalistic basis—such a sociology has certainly not gone beyond the stage of the "philosophy of history" of the eighteenth century.
But on the other hand, the more recent attempts to deduce the natural from the social order as one of the "oldest social traditions" (expression of Le Roy) are also unjustified. For, although the foundation of the natural order is laid by situations which reach their rationally perfect form only when determined by schemes, yet these situations themselves could not constitute a natural order without the generalizing abstracting activity of theoretic thought. Furthermore, even in the practical organization of reality, perfect situations and permanent empirical systems of perfect situations, such as the natural order of reality presupposes as its empirical basis, can be attained only if the schemes themselves are systematized by practical dogmas, whereas the social order as such does not imply any more comprehensive organization than the scheme. Finally, the most important argument against this sociological standpoint is that the social order itself is not a primary order of reality, but is a theoretic superstructure raised upon an imperfect and fragmentary type of practical organization, and a superstructure which could have no separate existence in its typical form except in so far as supplementary and opposed to the psychological order which, as we know, is not primary either. The practical schemes by which situations are determined assume a specifically social character only by contrast with the specifically personal psychological situations. Originally situations are not personal and schemes are not social; concrete objects and connections of the historical reality and practical systems
(289) of reality may be either limited to the spheres of experience and reflection of one individual, or extending to all the individuals of a group, or even covering the common domain of experience and reflection of many different social groups between which there is no social bond whatever. The distinctions between social and psychological, psychological and physical, are distinctions between correlative orders within the same empirical real world, each independent of the other though all together dependent, first on the concrete historical reality, secondly on practical activity which organizes and rationalizes it in part, and thirdly on theoretic thought which pushes this rationalization as far toward unity as it can go.
Of course, in numerous particular cases it may be possible to show how a certain systematic organization of physical reality has grown up within the experience of a social group under the influence of a socially recognized scheme which has been determining for many centuries individual practice and individual theory. Such special sociological investigations, up to the present pursued only occasionally and almost limited to the French sociological school, should certainly become more frequent, not only for theoretic, but also for practical social purposes, for they contribute much toward strengthening the faith in the power of social culture and toward undermining naturalistic fetishism. But the possibility of such sociological studies does not prove the social origin of the natural order as such, any more than the demonstration of the fact that the presence or absence of certain natural materials has contributed to the growth or decay of certain social institutions proves that the social order has its source in the natural order.
The rational character of the social order has been as yet only imperfectly determined by sociological investigations and methodological studies, precisely because of the continual extension to their field of either psychological or naturalistic
(290) views. We can therefore only outline those presuppositions which are logically indispensable for the constitution of a social science as supplementary and distinct from other branches of knowledge. The fundamental presupposition is, as we have seen, that social reality is formally constituted by schemes, by social rules, formulated or not, giving uniform and permanent definitions of personal situations. But these social rules as opposed to psychological experiences and attitudes are no longer conceived as concrete dynamic tendencies, as they originally are from the practical standpoint, but as static practical principles imposed upon the individual. Their active, dynamic character, by which they actually determine in each particular case the reconstruction of the schematic situation with the help of auxiliary situations, has been separated here from their formal, static, generally standardizing character, because the actual reconstruction of the schematic situation is now a psychological, personal matter, whereas the general standard which this reconstruction must follow is social, supra-personal. When the social rule is reflectively objectivated and formulated in words, or when a set of rules connected in any institution becomes attached to a common social symbol, the rule or the institution acquires for the individual who takes an attitude toward it the character of a specific social value superadded to its original character of a scheme.
Social values constitute the matter of social reality of which the schemes are the form. They are a specific product of the social order, intermediary between the concrete empirical objects composing historical reality and the things of natural reality. The scheme, by determining socially personal situations, determines also, of course, the objects included in these situations in a way which is formally general and stable and in so far similar to the determination of things; the social object is thus clearly distinguished from the concrete historical object which lacks one general and stable
(291) determination, but has many particular and changing determinations. But at the same time this determination, as social and opposed to the psychological variety of personal experiences, appears as a standard imposed upon individual experiencing of this object rather than as an absolutely real form inherent in the object itself; and a standard may be complied with or not. We cannot therefore exclude from the object as socially determined, as part of the general theoretically rationalized social reality, the variations of individual experiences which disagree with its social determination in the way we do with some particular variations in constructing particular practical situations and with all disagreeing variations in constructing the theoretic order of physical reality. These variations belong in some measure to the social object, not indeed as integral components of its content and meaning, as they do in concrete historical experience, but as psychological influences which affect the efficiency of its social determination, make the latter appear more or less valid individually; the social requirement that the object be commonly and permanently defined in a certain manner may be more or less realized in fact. And thus, if such divergent variations increase, the social determination of the object may be judged as no longer in conformity with the way in which the object commonly and actually appears to individual members of the group, and the object may receive a new determination. By this possibility of having its general and stable determination changed to another, equally general and stable but different, the social object is most clearly distinguished from the physical thing whose determination is supposed purely objective and unaffected by a change of personal experiences. Therefore, if we are forced to change the determination of a physical thing, we characterize this change as a discovery of the real nature of the thing and by opposition to this real nature qualify the preceding, rejected determination as a merely social product.
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The second fundamental theoretic presupposition about social reality is that, since the influence of social rules upon psychologically isolated individuals is logically possible only under the assumption of social communication between them, a social rule extends only as far as the necessary social communication reaches, that is, mostly over social groups limited in extension and duration. Here again the rule, theoretically qualified as social, distinguished itself from the original practical scheme as realizing itself in concrete historical reality. Since in the latter individual spheres of experience and reflection are not isolated from each other and since social communication, as we have seen in a former chapter, is not the condition of the community of experiences but, on the contrary, is conditioned by it, a practical organization of reality can pass from individual to individual without any need of conscious social influence and a scheme has originally no limits of application. Furthermore, since the social values are such in so far as determined by schemes, their extension and duration, unlike the extension and duration of concrete historical objects, become equally limited to a certain social group.
Social reality is thus divided into sections, each section formed by the social rules and values common to a certain intercommunicated social group. While these sections are, of course, not entirely isolated, certain rules and values can be communicated from one group to another, ,still their isolation is sufficiently marked to have social theory accept, for each such section, the principle of spatial localization elaborated by the naturalistic view of the world. The principle is not applied to the relations of rules and values existing within the domain of experience of one social group; these rules and values are socially extensive because coexisting in the experience of many members of the group, but in so far as they are social, not physical objects, they are not spatially isolated nor limited with refer-
(293) -ence to one another. But spatiality is presupposed for the relations between groups; each group with its total civilization becomes geographically localized. This idea of a geographic separation of civilization shows more clearly than anything else the relativity of the social order to the physical as well as the psychological order; while in historical reality geographic spatiality is conditioned by the concrete extension of the empirical world and the "geographical environment" exists within historical experience as a part of the world of cultural objects, from the special sociological standpoint concrete extension becomes included in the pure rational space and divided into sections with reference to the external, formal extension of the world of natural things.
The totality of social schemes and social values coexisting in a section of social reality limited to one group, embraces a great variety of cultural phenomena—political, economic, religious, moral, intellectual, aesthetic, hedonistic—and does not constitute in any sense one rational system, and the evolution of all these schemes and values does not manifest any one fundamental law. The rational theoretic order of social reality relies therefore as much on idealizing abstraction and generalization as that of psychological or physical reality. Out of the concrete complexity of the social life of a group single elements have to be theoretically isolated and a new systematic organization constructed from them.
Here again we find the possibility of two different orders, a static and a dynamic one. The distinction has become popular since Spencer expressed it, but the rather inadequate formulation which this philosopher gave to it prevented its importance from being sufficiently realized, so that in many sociological works we find it entirely obliterated. And yet there are two entirely different sets of problems implied in it—as different as the problems of the nature of things and those of the functional dependence of processes in the physical domain. On the one hand, we may study the objective
(294) nature of social schemes in the effect which each of them separately tends to have upon individual experience and behavior; that is, we investigate the perfect type of situation as it is defined socially by the scheme and as, in accordance with our presupposition of a perfect social rationality, it would always be realized in individual life if it were never interfered with by the influence of other schemes. In doing this, we should not, of course, limit ourselves to a given formulation of a scheme as it may be offered by the legal code, by religious or aesthetic canons, by current moral sayings, by theoretic judgments —expressed in spoken, written, or printed words, by economic contracts, etc.; but we should try to reconstruct comparatively, by a study of cases which can be considered approximately typical, what would be the actual working of the scheme if it did work perfectly. Thus isolated from its social context, the scheme may present such far-reaching analogies with certain schemes found in other social groups that the formation of a class becomes possible. Furthermore, schemes which differ in detail as to the particular nature of those objects and connections which they demand for the construction of their situations may still be similar with regard to the more general character of their material and to the broader outlines of the organization which they impose; thus, we can subordinate particular classes of schemes to general classes and reach a static classificatory systematization of social phenomena, of which every section of social science and every general system of sociology offer examples. If we want then synthetically to reconstruct, with the help of this static analytic system, any particular concrete fragment of social organization, we have only to find what schemes are actually working there and how their coexistence affects each of them, how they supplement or interfere with each other, $y studying comparatively the influence of various schemes upon each other, we reach a definition of various social complexes which can with more or less approximation be
(295) reduced to a relatively limited number of fundamental types. Every concrete social personality, every concrete institution, every artificially or half-artificially isolated fragment of a wider social group (a territorial unit like a village, a town, a city ward; a family group; a professional organization; a social class, etc.) is such a social complex of various working schemes, approximately reconstructible and reducible to types.
As against the problem of this static reconstruction, the problem of a dynamic order, of a rationally determinable evolution of social schemes, must appeal to completely different principles. Social reality by itself, in so far as it is perfectly social, its schemes general and stable, and its values determined by schemes, does not include any factors of evolution. To say that the cause of a social fact must be sought in another social fact, if by fact we mean, as the school of Durkheim does, the social rule in its active determination of individual experience and behavior, is as self-contradictory as would be a principle according to which the cause of a substance should be sought in another substance. A change of social schemes in a group can occur only if the old scheme has ceased to correspond actually to the prevalent experience and behavior of individual members and the new scheme has begun to correspond to them instead. This passage from the old to the new implies a period when neither the old nor the new is perfectly social, when individual experience and behavior with regard to the given values are very imperfectly determined socially, because they are determined by two different rules at once. This period of individualization is a necessary stage of every social becoming. The factor which works during this period, which makes the old scheme lose its determining power and the new scheme acquire determining power, cannot be defined in terms of social, but in terms of psychological reality. It is the attitude of the individuals who accept the situations imposed by the new scheme and reject
(296) the definition of the old scheme that brings the change. From the sociological standpoint the attitude alone cannot produce a new social rule directly from personal situations; the question of the absolute origin of the social order from non-socialized experience and reflection cannot be solved by sociology as a science of reality which presupposes an already existing social order. What individual attitudes as such can do is only to substitute within the limits of the given group one social rule for another, to modify a pre-existing social definition of personal situations so as to make it conform better with the actually experienced and constructed personal situations. The appearance of a new social scheme in a group can be explained therefore only on the ground of the combination of two antecedents: a pre-existing social scheme and an individual attitude. We have here a condition which is parallel with that found in psychological explanation; there also the appearance of a new individual attitude required two antecedents, a pre-existing attitude and a social value. Thus, while the static psychological and the static social orders are entirely distinct from each other and can be treated separately, the corresponding dynamic orders encroach upon each other; causal explanations of the psychological demand the use of social elements and vice versa.
The laws of social becoming following the general formula scheme-attitude-scheme (or, if we objectivate the scheme as a specifically sociological value, value-attitude-value) will certainly present various degrees of generality, just as do causal natural laws. These varying degrees will permit us to organize them into an abstract system. With their help, any concrete social becoming may be conceived as the result of a combination of several laws, and types of such combinations may be approximately distinguished. But this is still a question of the future, and the same point must be emphasized here which we have already raised when speaking of the natural and the psychological dynamic orders. A theoretic
(297) reconstruction of social becoming based upon the concept of laws evidently cannot pretend to explain the appearance of absolutely new forms of social schemes, since the law as such is always a law of repetition. It can only explain how a scheme, already pre-existing in concrete experience, became socialized, realized, and applied in a certain group at a certain epoch, but not how it appeared in the empirical world in general as a result of a new and spontaneous schematic determination of situations which were not schematized before.
The social order, static or dynamic, cannot cover entirely its field of reality any more than the natural and the psychological orders can exhaust their fields. There is always some irrationality left over, manifested in the impossibility of reconstructing theoretically any given static section of social reality, any given social becoming, otherwise than approximately. No concrete fragment of the social world can be synthetically reconstructed in its completeness out of schemes or laws of change—neither the total civilization of a nation, nor the cultural life of a class or of a locally isolated community within the nation, nor the concrete reality of an empirical institution with all the manifold interests of its agents and its public crossing one another in the most various and unaccountable ways, nor even the relatively limited sphere of cultural existence of a social personality. And even in so far as our synthetic reconstruction goes, we are unable to account fully either for the coexistence within the given concrete section of social reality of such schemes as we find working together or for the co-operation within this given concrete part of social becoming of such laws as we find developing together. We can construct abstractly perfect classificatory systems of hierarchically ordered schemes; we can hope to reach some day perfect abstract systems of hierarchically ordered laws; but when we have to extend our abstract, rational order to the
(298) concrete, social world, we find that it applies perfectly only to artificially isolated, and therefore also more or less abstract, combinations of schemes or causal series, whereas, as soon as we want to reconcile concreteness and rationality, the best and only methodical device which we can apply is the concept of the type, which has neither a perfect rationality, for there is no reason fully accounting for the fact that a particular type contains certain particular rational elements in a certain specific empirical combination, nor a perfect concreteness, for every concrete fragment of social reality only approximately realizes the type.
Sociology by itself is unable to overcome these difficulties, for its scientific task is to supplement psychology in rationalizing personal experience and behavior as personal and its very existence is bound to the concept of inter-personal or super-personal reality superimposed upon and therefore relative to the division between concrete psychological individuals. Therefore, in separating for sociological synthesis fragments of social reality from the whole to which they belong, we must keep on the ground of psychological personalities and follow the lines traced by their psychological isolation and social interaction; we can, in other words, separate sociologically, for theoretic reconstruction, a section of social culture from the rest, only together with the men who participate in it, who are controlled by it psychologically or are modifying it, and it is the fact of this fragment's being the social reality of certain men which permits us to treat it as a distinct fragment. Therefore back of every sociological concrete object-matter, however limited it may be, there is always the whole complexity of human personalities; however much this complexity may be reduced on account of the exclusion of the natural world from it and because of psychological rationalization, it is still irrational enough to prevent any part of reality into which it is introduced from ever being exhausted by any theoretical order.
(299) A full and rational scientific synthesis of a concrete fragment of social culture would be possible only if this fragment itself were already empirically, practically rationalized; if it included only objects perfectly determined by situations, situations perfectly determined by schemes, those schemes themselves in a limited, rationally exhaustible number and variety, and all belonging together not by the mere fact of their empirical coexistence but by a common rational determination with regard to one another. Now, these conditions are approximately found in a dogmatically organized system of schemes. The political organization of a state, a system of religion, a style of art as developed in particular works, the system of ideas constituting the ready body of a science as taught in schools, the economic organization of a trust, the technical division of labor and co-operation in a branch of industry, are examples of fragments of culture whose complexity can be assumed theoretically exhaustible and whose systematization is approximately rational. And the social order, even within the limits which it is rational, presupposes implicitly a dogmatic stabilization and imposition of schemes upon social life; otherwise there would be no ground for the assumption that any scheme will continue to work within a given section of social reality until causally supplanted by a different one.
In so far as we succeed in subdividing a sphere of social civilization into such rational fragments, the difficulties connected with the synthetic reconstruction of sections of social reality are evidently removed. But we are no longer in the domain of sociology. The reality with which we deal is no longer social in the exact sense of the term, for in the very measure in which we want such systems of schemes to be rationally perfect, we must abstractly exclude the concrete complexities of psychological individuals as their empirical foundation and limit the manifoldness of social schemes by which these psychologically separated complexities are united
(300) and determined socially. Our object-matter is no longer the group or the personality as typical combination of various social schemes. Men count exclusively as bearers of the given system, as underlying foundation upon which the system becomes realized in extension and duration. From the standpoint of a perfect state organization, a human group is not a concrete historical nation with multiform half-chaotically combined spheres of cultural interests, but exclusively a body of political beings, subjects, or citizens, determined only with regard to their rôle as governed or governing, as participating in the realization and maintenance of the state system. From the standpoint of a religious system, men are not a concrete gathering of individuals whose lives are determined not only by religious, but also by hedonistic, aesthetic, intellectual, economic, political, and similar schemes; they are an organized church, a body of purely religious beings whose only significance is to make the religious system a historical reality. From the standpoint of a ready system of art or science, they are not a scattered plurality of complicated and various personal types, but united and relatively homogeneous spheres of artists plus the public, of masters plus students, defined exclusively in view of their task of realizing and perpetuating the historical existence of the given art of science. From the standpoint of an economic system of schemes, they are homines oeconomici, the abstract human entities whose experiences and attitudes are exclusively determined by this system of schemes so that the latter can be realized; from that of a technical system, they are exclusively technical workers, planning minds, or executing hands, etc.
Of course, when we ask ourselves how a given system of schemes can be realized psychologically or sociologically, or what is its psychological or its sociological significance, we have to reintroduce the psychological individual or social type; but then the system itself is no longer a perfect rational order of definite schemes, but a disconnected set of psycho-
(301) -logical experiences or social values, to be rationally reconstructed by psychological or sociological methods. It is hardly necessary to mention that a psychological reconstruction cannot by any means follow the rational organization of such a system of schemes, but breaks the latter up into an indefinite plurality of personal subjective data or attitudes. These data are classified alongside other experiences of each psychological individual who in his own way perceives or conceives the system-experiences which have nothing to do with this system as objectively closed and rationally organized —and these attitudes are dynamically connected with other attitudes which belong to entirely different domains. But it is worth emphasizing, in view of the growing tendency to ignore this super-sociological or extra-sociological order for the benefit of sociology, that a sociological reconstruction of a political, religious, economic, aesthetic, system is as impossible as a psychological one.
The conditions of scientific development in the field of social culture have been different from those in other fields. Whereas the scientific recognition of the psychological order followed that of the physical order and the realization of a sociological order came later still—an evolution which, as we see, corresponds to the logical connection between these three types of the rationalistic ideal—the recognition and scientific treatment of dogmatically determined systems of schemes of the kind illustrated by our examples preceded often by many centuries any methodical attempts of a sociological treatment of the respective domains. Thus, the theory of the state was already highly developed in Greece, whereas consciously sociological studies of political schemes hardly go back farther than Spencer's Political Institutions; a historical theory of scientific systems begins with Aristotle, if not with Plato, whereas a systematic sociological treatment of intellectual schemes has been started just recently; economic systems are methodically studied by English economic science of the eighteenth century,
(302) whereas a sociological study of economic schemes is scarcely more than thirty years old; and so on. The reason of this will become clear when we realize—a point which will be treated presently—that the rational organization of these systems from the theoretic standpoint appears as an order of reality which, while supplementing and continuing other orders, differs from them, in that reality by its own pre-existing nature does not contribute anything to its formation; this order is an immediate and full manifestation, in the field of reality, of the logical organization of active thought. The systematic order which logical thought, by virtue of its own organization alone, tends to produce in reality and which it always would produce if not forced to comply in some measure for its own purposes with the re-existing real conditions, began to be abstractly studied long before the study of those real orders in which the pre-existing concrete reality cannot be neglected had reached the problem of the sociological order. For it is always the first impluse of theoretic reflection, in its efforts to reach the ideal of perfect rationality, to ignore the limitations which reality by its concreteness imposes upon rationalizing thought. It is not strange therefore that idealistic theories of the state, of science, of religion, of economics, etc., have been evolved before sociology started to treat these domains as subjected to its own order. Under the influence of the empirical current predominating in intellectual life during the past half of a century, the consciousness that the sociological order could be extended to fields in which up to then an ideal order was assumed and that this extension yielded unexpected and interesting discoveries, resulted in the widespread belief that there was a new and better method to be substituted for the old within political science, economic science, theory of knowledge, theory of art, etc.; whereas this extension meant that concrete empirical phenomena which were already the object-matter of these older sciences could be made also, when differently defined and taken in a
(303) different connection, the object-matter of a new science, sociology, without ceasing to be treated as realizing an ideal, non-sociological order.
The difference between the two orders becomes immediately clear when we begin to analyze sociologically the composition or the becoming of any one of these cultural systems of objects. For, if we isolate the various schemes which constitute a given political, religious, economic, or other system and study each of them separately with regard to the definition which it gives to personal situations, we shall find a great variety between the schemes in one system, which makes it evident that it is not any particular similarity which brought them together. Thus, a political system may include not only many dissimilar schemes of legislation, jurisdiction, and execution, often incorporated from completely different political groups, but also schemes of economic organization (governmental business enterprises), of intellectual and moral education (school control and press censorship), of religious institutions (state religion), etc., which cannot be classed as political by themselves but assume a political form only in so far as and because incorporated into the state system. Similarly, a religious system may not only contain religious beliefs and rites of the most heterogeneous character, but also include schemes by which it tends to control morality, art, science, politics, economics, etc., and which have a religious sanction only because subordinated to a religious dogma, as schemes whose permanent realization is claimed as necessary for the maintenance of the whole religious system in historical reality. In short, when we construct a classificatory order of schemes as we do in social statics, this order will cut across all the existing dogmatic systems of schemes, will put into one class schemes belonging to different systems and into different classes schemes belonging to the same system. From this standpoint the coexistence of certain schemes rather than others in a given political, religious, economic, dogmatic
(304) system will seem as equally "accidental," equally matter-of-fact, as the coexistence of certain schemes in the sphere of social culture of an individual or a group. The static sociological order cannot account for the rational connection of schemes in a dogmatic system; and the dynamic sociological order, on the other hand, cannot account for the exclusion of schemes which make at each moment of its existence the dogmatic system rationally exhaustible. For, from the standpoint of social causality, each of the schemes included in a political, religious, economic system appears as dynamically connected with schemes which are completely outside of political, religious, economic life, as influencing them and influenced by them, so that a causal explanation of the social origin or disappearance of any of these systems or an adequate account of all the social consequences of its existence, its development, or its decay would require practically a dynamic synthesis of the entire social life of the group within which it is realized.
The rational theoretic order based on the existence of dogmatic systems of schemes must be therefore entirely different from that which sociology postulates. Its nature will be best understood if we remember, first, that the dogmatic system manifests a tendency of active thought to subordinate reality completely to ideal demands, to control it independently of pre-existing real conditions. Secondly, we know that the dogmatic system is the highest type of practical organization of reality and, unless it is a part of another dogmatic system, is never practically conditioned by any other real organization. Therefore, while the physical object draws its determination from the situation, while the psychological situation is stable and uniform as a result of the scheme, while the continuity and generality of selfidentical schemes in social life presupposes that these schemes are determined by dogmas, the determination of the dogma is purely ideal; whatever rational perfection it possesses is
(305) directly derived from the logical systematization of the activity which constructs it and not from any superior systematization of reality. For these two reasons we call the theoretic order based upon dogmatic systems the ideal order of reality.
The ideal ground of this order manifests itself in the methodological presuppositions made by the sciences which construct it. A scientific study of dogmatic systems must, of course, postulate a perfect rationality of its object-matter, like every branch of knowledge which tends to realize the rationalistic theoretic ideal. And since it is evident that no dogmatic systems found in empirical reality are ever absolutely perfect, any more than other types of practical organization, a science which studies these systems must first of all idealize them, reconstruct them analytically as if they were perfect. Now, in view of the fact that their organization tends to be entirely independent of pre-existing reality, and approaches perfection in the very measure in which it succeeds in controlling reality completely, in subordinating it unconditionally to the demands of thought, a perfect dogmatic system would be one constructed by thought absolutely freely on the ground of an accepted dogma, without any regard to the given real conditions. Therefore a science which postulates an absolute rationality of the order based on dogmatic systems must assume that the rational organization of every system which it meets in experience possesses and manifests a perfect rational essence, follows with an ideal necessity from the dogma which it is based upon quite independent of the empirical conditions in which it is realized. Given, therefore, a certain practical dogma and a certain field of reality to control, the theorist can construct a priori a perfect system of schemes for the control of this reality and assume that, if these schemes were fully realized, the given field of reality would be fully controlled in accordance with the demands of the dogma. Of course, these schemes may as a
(306) matter of fact never be realized practically, because active thought may be unable so to organize as to overcome the obstacles which the reality to be controlled puts in the way of their realization; but this empirical lack of realization does not impair the intrinsic perfection of the rational essence of the system as constructed by the theorist.
Given a certain constitution and a reality—a social group—to be politically controlled, the political scientist can construct theoretically a perfect state system in which every scheme is rationally founded upon the constitution and which thus represents the rational essence of a state possessing such a constitution. The problem of the actual realization of each scheme in particular and of the system as a whole is completely different and has nothing to do with this problem of rational essence; on the ground of the latter the political scientist can say only that if, by whatever concrete empirical organization of human activities, all the schemes rationally demanded by the constitution are ever realized, the social group will be completely controlled in its political life in accordance with the constitution. Similarly, given a certain scientific or philosophical principle and a domain of empirically founded knowledge to be controlled by theoretic systematization, the theorist of knowledge can construct a rationally perfect scientific or philosophical system of concepts which will represent the rational essence of a theory based upon this principle. It will then be a completely different problem whether such a system of concepts is realizable in fact, whether in view of the already realized and fixed body of knowledge it is practically possible to give old ideas such interpretations or to produce by observation such new ideas as will give to the system the empirical foundation which it requires. But suppose this is done, the given domain of knowledge will be completely controlled from the standpoint of the given principle. In another field again, on the ground of the dogmas accepted by the classical or by
(307) the materialistic schools of economy and of an economic reality to be controlled by these dogmas, economists build rationally perfect systems of schemes which, if neither of them expresses the rational essence of economic life in general, correspond at least essentially to some empirical dogmatic systems among all those which can be found in the concrete complexity of economic organization. Again from the purely rational standpoint it does not matter whether the classical or the materialistic or any other economic system will ever be completely and adequately realized in the empirical world; this depends on the question whether our activity will be able to realize all the conditions necessary for the continuous actualization of the schemes demanded by the dogma.
The political scientist, the economist, the theorist of art, of religion, even the theorist of knowledge usually claims that in constructing a perfectly rational system he follows empirical data and does not act a priori. This claim is, of course, in some measure justified. First, the scientist usually does not attempt to construct rational essences or political, economic, aesthetic, theoretic, moral, religious systems which are not at least partially realized in the empirical world, and thus he limits the field of his theory to the historically given practical organizations; though this limitation is not general and the theorist, under the influence of practical considerations, often intentionally transgresses past and present empirical reality and builds non-existing systems in the expectation that these will be realized in the future, still this is not considered a properly scientific activity. Furthermore, in order to construct the rational essence of any system, the scientist must be acquainted with the practical activities to which the organization of empirical systems of this type is due and with the reality upon which these activities bear. He cannot construct a political system, a moral system, a religious system, an aesthetic system, by theoretic reflection alone, for the rational
(308) organization which theoretic reflection creates in reality is not the same as the rational organizations which political, moral, religious, aesthetic activities create. He must practically realize what political, moral, religious, aesthetic activities are; that is, he must be able to reproduce these activities mentally, though not instrumentally. It is precisely because, and only because, these activities can be reproduced, or produced, mentally that he can substitute for his scientific purposes a rationally perfect dogmatic practical system for those rationally imperfect ones which are instrumentally realized in the historical world. The actual subject-matter of his science is not the empirically given and fully real system which has been or is being constructed by others with the help of instrumental activities, but a model system of the same type which he practically constructs himself with the help of activities of the same class, only mental. Mentally performed political, economic, moral, aesthetic activities do not meet such obstacles in the pre-existing reality as instrumental activities do, and therefore a mentally constructed dogmatic system of schemes can be at once rationally perfect and can serve as material for the theoretic determination of the rational essence of systems of this type. Such a mentally constructed practical system corresponds, in sciences of ideally ordered reality, to the experiment in physical science; it is an artificially created model of perfect rationality.
When a political scientist determines the rational essence of an absolute monarchy or of a democratic republic, he performs a double activity: first, he performs practically, though only mentally, all the activities which a political sovereign would have to reproduce instrumentally in organizing a state in accordance with a certain constitution; secondly, as a theorist, he reconstructs this mental organization scientifically, using this time all the materials and instruments necessary to produce a fully objective and rational system of ideas. The problem of the empirical bearing of a science of the ideal
(309) order is not how a dogmatic organization existing in the empirical world can be theoretically reconstructed in general; we know that it can be in so far as its schemes are practically limited in their number and complexity; but the question is, "How can all the existing practical organizations of a certain class be theoretically systematized?" And this depends on the question of how far such political, economic, aesthetic, or religious systems, serving as basis for the theoretic reconstruction of rational essences, actually correspond to the instrumentally realized political, economic, aesthetic, or religious systems. Since every science tries to reconcile rationality with concreteness, to reach a theoretic systematization as perfect as the reality upon which it bears permits, and to keep as closely in touch with empirical reality as its rationalistic ideal allows, the normal tendency of political science, of economics, of theory of art, of theory of religion, will be on the one hand to construct such model systems as would correspond each to as many as possible empirical organizations; and on the other hand to take as far as possible into consideration and to explain rationally the deviations which each of these empirical organizations present as compared with the model system which is assumed to express their rational essence.
The first tendency leads to a hierarchical classification of rational essences with regard to the generality of their empirical application: for example, the rational essence formulated in the concept "state" has a wider field of application than those expressed by the terms "absolute monarchy," "constitutional monarchy," "republic." The general scientific concepts reached in this domain are those which serve as ground for separating the sciences of cultural systems from one another. Thus, at the basis of the separation between the political and economic sciences lies the assumption that there is a common rational essence of all political systems and a different common rational essence of all economic systems. Neither
(310) of these rational essences can be reduced to the other, and thus all efforts to reduce the political to the economic, like the one which historical materialism has tried, are rooted in a misunderstanding. Of course, in the concrete social life of a group we can find innumerable relations of partial dependence between particular political and particular economic schemes, and vice versa; but the study of these relations is the task of sociology, not of political or economic science, and involves, as we have already seen, an isolation of the schemes thus connected by social causality from the several different systems in which they are connected with other schemes by a rational determination for the fulfilment of the demands of the respective dogmas. Since the fundamental difference between the sciences of the ideal order of reality and sociology is that the object-matter of the former is the dogmatic organization of schemes which the latter ignores, by treating schemes of rationally different systems as causally dependent on one another and thus dissolving the systems we simply substitute sociology for political or economic science.
With regard to the deviations of empirical systems from their rational essence, sciences of the ideal order began first by assuming generally that, since all rationality of these systems comes from the logical order of thought, all break of rational order comes from the irrational empirical reality and therefore cannot be rationally explained. This is the stand taken by ancient science. But modern science in its effort to reconcile concreteness with rationality can no longer be satisfied with such a summary solution. The latter is, moreover, in disaccordance with the very principle of the ideal order which is not supposed to be dependent on real conditions. In the very measure in which we assume that active thought is able completely to control reality, we cannot admit that the latter puts in the way of dogmatically determined systems obstacles which active thought is entirely unable to overcome. From the standpoint of the ideal order, the imperfect realiza-
(311) -tion of a rational essence in an empirical system of schemes must be taken to be the result of an incomplete formal organization of the activities whose task it is to realize this essence within the given sphere of reality, not as the result of insuperable material hindrances. However, the sciences of the ideal order cannot study the absolute origin of this order in creative activity; just like all other sciences, they must assume the order on which their investigation bears as existing and ready before it becomes the object-matter of theoretic reflection, even if it should be only mentally realized by the scientist himself, for the existence of this order is the very foundation of theoretic rationalization. An attempt to explain by the nature of active thought why the latter succeeded or did not succeed in organizing a system perfectly would lead to the whole problem of the logical order of activities, which is beyond the reach of any science of reality. And since there is no higher organization of reality by which its dogmatic organization is determined and explicable, the sciences dealing with dogmatic systems cannot be supplemented by any other sciences of reality and have thus to rely exclusively on the ideal order itself to explain the imperfections of this very order.
This means that of the two principles with the help of which theoretic reflection tries to reconcile concreteness with rationality, the principle of approximation and that of interference, the sciences of the ideal order have to reject entirely the first and give to the second a form and development which it does not possess in any other branch of knowledge. These sciences cannot admit that the rational essence of a dogmatic system may be realized only approximately or that for any reasons such a system may fail in attaining perfect rationality; but they must assume that any number of dogmatic systems of a similar or different type may coexist, each perfectly developed, in a given section of the cultural world. And thus, if in the political organization of a group we do not find
(312) some of the schemes realized which the constitution demands, if a system of science or philosophy which we are studying seems to lack some of the concepts required for the full theoretic application of its fundamental principles, if an empirical economic system does not show in practice all the schemes necessary for the realization of the dogma, we must assume nevertheless that these schemes do exist and that if we do not find them in observation, it is because they have not reached the same degree of realness as those which we do observe. We must implicitly suppose that the political schemes which, though required by the constitution, are not manifestly realized in the group, nevertheless already exist within the total sphere of civilization of this group. We must implicitly assume that the concepts which, though demanded by the principles of, a philosophic or scientific system, are not formulated in words, nevertheless already exist in the domain of knowledge; that the economic schemes rationally necessary for the perfection of an economic organization are already there in economic life, though we cannot find them. Such assumptions are implied in the very fact of treating an empirical system as identical with the ideal system theoretically reconstructed by the scientist, though they do not involve, of course, any positive supposition as to where and when the schemes whose existence we postulate have been realized. Sometimes, indeed, such an implicit assumption becomes the starting-point of a research, and we often find in fact that the political schemes which at first glance seem to be lacking really exist in the political practice of the group or of some of its members, though they are not formulated; that the concepts which are not expressed in the works of the scientist or the philosopher have been in fact constructed by him, though not made public; that an apparently incomplete business organization already includes a plan for more complete development. In other cases, the theoretic reconstruction of a system as
(313) rationally perfect becomes the starting-point of a practical activity which will realize in the empirical system the schemes that seem to be lacking and will thus make it express fully its rational essence; the study of the political organization of a country gives the initiative for new laws, and the critical analysis of a scientific system starts new observations. But from the purely formal rational standpoint such questions have a secondary importance: for the rational perfection of the system it does not matter by whom and under what conditions its schemes have been brought into existence nor how much reality they possess, provided they exist already—and they certainly do exist at least mentally at the moment when the theorist begins to investigate them.
On the other hand, if in a given domain of cultural reality we find together with schemes necessary for a dogmatic system other schemes which do not belong to it rationally, we must assume that there is another system existing in this domain with more or less realness, and that these superfluous schemes are a part of it. This is a very frequent case. In every social group we find several different political, economic, religious systems existing together, and our task is then to separate them and to reconstruct each in its rational perfection. We have consciously attempted to do it elsewhere;[7] more or less clear illustrations of this method can be found in many historical monographs.
Following these two postulates in which the principle of interference expresses itself in the sciences of the ideal order—the postulate that in each empirical system its total rational essence exists, though not always with the same degree of realness, and the postulate that each scheme which does not belong to a given system must belong to another—every science of the ideal order can approach a complete theoretic exhaustion and systematization of its field. These sciences
(314) are the only ones which find in their way no empirical real concreteness necessary and yet essentially impossible to overcome, since their object-matter is originally as much rationalized as practical reality can be, and their method, by ignoring the degree of realness which their order possesses, leaves to them only such irrationality to deal with as comes not from the pre-existing real chaos, but from the imperfect organization of activity.
But it is evident that there can be only a static, not a dynamic, ideal order of reality, since the ultimate factor of all evolution here is active thought, and therefore no order of reality, however highly idealized, can explain it. There is no possible scientific theory of the evolution of political organization, of morality, of economics, of knowledge, of religion, of art, of technique. Science can follow the succession of different systems in history; it can dissolve these systems and explain sociologically the origin of each scheme composing them; but a dogmatic system in the intrinsic essence of its organization is for science a rationally analyzable but genetically inexplicable datum, whose source lies beyond the reach of science, in creative activity.
THE PROBLEM OF THE UNITY OF KNOWLEDGE
The rationalistic ideal of knowledge, when applied to reality in so far as already in some measure practically organized, finds, as we see, a double limitation. First, none of the general presuppositions by which philosophy tries to determine once and forever the essential character of objects and their connections, by qualifying them as physical, or psychological, or sociological, or elements of ideal systems, are anything more than methodological assumptions, objectively justified by being approximately realized within certain practical systems and apt to be theoretically postulated beyond these systems, but unable to become ontological truths about reality in general. This means that there can
(315) be no systematic philosophical theory of reality as of a rational whole—beyond, of course, a mere study of the forms which reality acquires as object-matter of practice and of knowledge, like the study we have attempted here. Even the possibility of our present study, as we shall see in another work, is ultimately due to the fact that all forms of reality, even though entirely different from the forms of active thought, are directly or indirectly derived from them. All that can be done by theoretic reflection about reality is to reconstruct rationally, on the ground of certain methodological presuppositions, fragment after fragment of the empirical world, thus approaching indefinitely to the ideal limit of its complete theoretic exhaustion. And even if this limit were ever attained, still there would be no place for a philosophical ontology based on the general nature of reality besides the sciences based on the particular empirical phenomena. For, when gradually reconstructing reality scientifically on the assumption of a certain formal order, we unify indeed disconnected fragments into one rational system and thus generalize this order; but the unity of the system is directly and in itself a unity of knowledge, not of reality, and becomes a unity of reality only as a dynamic connection superimposed upon the disconnected practical world when the ideas constituting the theoretic system are actualized as thoughts in application to reality.
A rational order, by being generalized by science, does not become one inherent order of reality absolutely imposing itself upon our thought; it exists only as a set of innumerable particular suggestions offered by objects, beside other suggestions, as a plurality of specific meaning which in each particular case thought is free to follow or not, and which it regularly follows only when logically determined by the system of knowledge which has created those meanings, when applying again in actuality this system to its original object-matter. Therefore the methodological presuppositions
(316) with the help of which we construct our theoretic system never can become ontological truths bearing upon the entire reality covered by this system; they remain methodological forever, they serve to "rediscover" rational determinations of empirical reality every time the ready system is actualized by being applied to experience, just as they served to "discover" them when the system was first constructed. The specifically "theoretic" suggestions which the objects offer —their suggestions to be taken in accordance with their scientific determination—may grow more and more powerful with every application of the system; but the theoretic order is always actually being extended only to particular objects or groups of objects and for particular purposes, never actually applied to all objects at once, in general and absolutely, independently of specific theoretic or practical problems.
This first limitation of the theoretic ideal should not be taken in the Kantian sense. It is not merely the Kantian world of things-in-themselves, but also the very world which Kant qualified as phenomenal and which philosophy was supposed to master in the very essence of its order, which is in fact inaccessible to philosophical reconstruction—for the "forms a priori" which theoretic reason imposes upon it are not in fact necessary forms of our "phenomenal" reality, are not transcendental conditions with which experience must conform. What makes precisely all attempts of philosophy to construct an absolute theory of empirical reality hopeless is that any forms of reality which it may find assumed in scientific research are partly objectively realized before science and partly not, and that science by postulating their perfect realization imposes nothing upon reality absolutely and unconditionally, but only gives to itself the task of trying step by step to superimpose upon the imperfect real order a more perfect one. These forms are not in any sense the necessary conditions of experience, or even of organized experience, for concrete experience lacks them and practically
(317) organized experience never perfectly realizes them. If they are now the universally used methodical assumptions of our science, it is because our science in its historical development has not only accepted the general ideal of rationality, but also the specific tendency to advance toward this ideal by the way of extending and perfecting in its own systems the pre-existing practical organization of reality, instead of taking some other, logically equally possible way. Perhaps an adequate history of science would even show that it has often tried in the past to branch off into different lines. Now it is so stabilized in its fundamental tendencies that for a long time there is scarcely any possibility of its changing its methodological ground; and if it changed this, it would no longer be science in the historically accepted sense of the term.
But the very fact that the forms which science uses as its methodological presuppositions are neither the necessary forms of experience nor those of knowledge, and are only imperfectly realized in practice, gives a significance to the future progress of science which it could not possess under the Kantian conception. For, if historically developing science were only getting from reality the order which non-historical absolute reason had for all time put into reality, what would be the objective importance of such work ? Whereas by actually superadding to the imperfect rationality of reality a growingly perfect one, science performs a creative function which has an objective significance even apart from its practical applications, by introducing something new into the world.
But even the ideal limits toward which scientific progress tends lack, as we have seen in the preceding sections, that absolute perfection of rationality which philosophy used to require by believing in one theoretic system of reality. Not only is it true that reality cannot be exhausted in one theoretic system now, but it never will be, even if all its fragments and aspects ever should become completely rationalized theoretically in particular scientific researches. For the results of
(318) scientific activity, by the very nature of the methodological assumptions which determine the ways of stating and solving scientific problems, can under no condition be unified into one system of knowledge. We have followed the division of scientific fields as it has actually developed in history and we have found that, when science takes as fundamental the physical order of reality, that is, an order based exclusively on the perfect practical form of objects and connections but ignoring the practical organizations within which they receive this form, it must add to this order three other entirely incommensurable, though supplementary, orders, built with entirely different methodological presuppositions, so that reality presents four different rational aspects based upon the fundamental forms of different stages of practical organization: the thing, the situation, the scheme, the dogma.
Suppose now that, by some radical modification of the entire body of our scientific knowledge, science should ever accept as fundamental not the physical order of things, but the ideal order of dogmatic systems corresponding to the highest stage of practical organization; suppose that the sciences of cultural instead of those of natural reality should constitute the rational basis of our theoretic reflection. Since the dogmatic system contains all the subordinate stages of practical organization—schemes, situations, and things—there would then be no reason for supplementing this order by the social, psychological, and physical orders; for all the social schemes, personal situations, physical things, and processes would find place and rationalization within the scope of an order of dogmatic systems, if the latter were not reduced, as they must be now, to an ideal order ignoring pre-existing concrete reality, but were studied in all the details of their practical development in the historical world. A full knowledge of cultural reality would be a rational knowledge of entire reality as practically determined, and yet, even then, scientific unity would not be attainable. For on the ground
(319) of cultural reality we have several entirely different types of rational practical systems, such as theoretic, aesthetic, moral, religious, political, economic, technical; and supposing even that each of these types should be theoretically reduced to a perfect rational unity, the scientific systems constructed on the basis of these different types would still remain entirely separated and different from one another. And since each of these systems, if fully developed, would extend over the entire reality—for it is clear that the entire reality could be viewed from the theoretic, the aesthetic, the moral, the religious, the technical standpoint—we would have still as many different incommensurable and disconnected theoretic aspects of reality as there are theoretically irreducible types of cultural systems of schemes.
Thus, the concept of a theoretic rationality of the entire real world, even if taken as an ideal of knowledge, must reconcile itself with a pluralistic interpretation of science; it can mean only that if the ultimate limit of scientific development were ever attained, every fragment or aspect o: reality would be scientifically determined by some rational system of ideas built from the standpoint of some rational order. The concept of a realistic rational monism, of one theoretic system embracing all empirical reality, is not even an ideal: it is a chimera.
There is, however, one imaginable objection against this pluralistic conclusion, on a ground which has already been used to maintain the possibility of reconstructing concrete reality, at least in its most important features, by one science. Does not the limitation of each of the scientific orders outlined above come from the very fact that none of them deals directly with the original concrete world of historical objects, but with one-sidedly and narrowly determined, isolated fragments of this world—practically organized systems? And is there not one prominent branch of knowledge whose object-matter is the total historical reality in its primary
(320) empirical concreteness ? Is not therefore historical knowledge, in the widest sense of the term, the one and the only knowledge which can reconstruct theoretically the whole reality without any distinction of abstract and incommensurable orders? The problem is very interesting indeed, and we regret not to be able to give it here the whole attention it deserves, but to be obliged to limit ourselves to a few general remarks.
First of all, there can be a question here only of a history of reality; the problem of a history of activity does not bear directly upon the theoretic reconstruction of reality as a whole. Most of what is called history is history of reality, cultural and natural. Now, it is clear that the history of reality does not work upon the presupposition of any general historical rational order, distinct from the special physical, psychological, sociological, and ideal orders. The only presupposition which distinguishes it from each and all of these special sciences is that in concrete historical extension and duration some or all of these orders are interconnected and melted in a general creative becoming, in a continuous development of the new which cannot be explained on the ground of any definite rational order and can be only approximately reached from case to case, as an imperfectly accountable synthesis of several orders. Even natural history, already limited by the naturalistic viewpoint to one abstract side of historical becoming, cannot work within its limits on the assumption of one historical order as such, but on that of an imperfectly rationalizable synthesis of the static order of things and the dynamic order of processes. And we know that cultural history needs all of the scientific orders together to reconstruct any past historical object or set of historical objects. We find physical, psychological, sociological, ideal presuppositions at work in every historical investigation, whether its task is the biography of an individual, or the history of a group, or the reconstruction of any past concrete domain of art, religion, literature, science,
(321) etc., in their historical connections with other domains of the cultural world.
All these methodological presuppositions can be used in two entirely different manners, depending on the purpose of historical investigation. Historical reconstruction of the past may be nothing but an auxiliary activity preparing materials for other, systematic, sciences; or it may be an aim in itself, for which other scientific researches with their specific methods are merely auxiliary activities preparing instruments. In the first case history of the past plays the same rôle as observation of the present: it brings within the range of the scientist select data which he will use for physical, psychological, sociological, cultural, generalizations. Its object is not reconstruction of historical reality in its empirical concreteness, but selection and collection of such abstractly isolated fragments of reality as can be treated from the standpoint of a certain theoretic order. In this sense, historical investigation is in some measure a part of almost every scientific research, since we seldom find everything we need to construct our theoretic systems within the immediate reach of our present practical experience and must rely more or less on realities which are no longer practically actual, or not practically actual within our part of concrete extension, so that we must reproduce them indirectly, "mentally, " with the help of other experiences or testimonies of other people. There is nothing in history when thus used which would justify its conception as of one separate and independent branch of intellectual activity. A psychological, sociological, political, aesthetic, theory based partly or even entirely upon the reconstructed culture of past peoples does not belong in the, sphere of "historical science" any more than does a physical or astronomical theory using the experiments or observations made a few years ago by a scientist who since died.
History as separate and self-determined pursuit appears only when the most exact possible reproduction of historical
(322) objects as such becomes its fundamental interest, and all the methodological presuppositions and theoretic generalizations of other sciences are used for the sole purpose of obtaining with their help the most adequate possible acquaintance with the past, either by excluding on their ground suppositions about the past which would not fit into our world in so far as already determined by its practical organization and in some measure by its theoretic orders, or, more fruitfully, by supplementing with their help such insufficient and incomplete data as can be directly obtained by oral or written tradition. But history in this sense is not theoretic reconstruction: it is creative continuation of the past in the most emphatic sense of the term. A historical work is, of course, by its rational form, its symbolic expression, its material existence as a book, a new cultural object. But the ultimate significance of its content, of the subject-matter of historical thought, is not to be an aesthetic picture of historical reality as opposed to the reality pictured, but that reality itself, brought to life again with the help of its present remnants as materials and theoretic ideas as instruments. Without this creative revival, without this conscious reproduction, past culture would after a time disappear completely from the sphere of our experience; it would lose almost entirely its realness without being exactly annihilated. Reproduced by history, historical objects reappear in our experience with a new real influence, become actualized again, usually indeed—as we have seen in a previous chapter—with different connections, in different complexes and systems, often much less important practically than they used to be. Sometimes, however, they become even more important; who does not know, for example, how much more social influence the social personality of a national hero or of a religious founder often has when historically reproduced than when still materially and psychologically existing
Because of this actual, present reality of historically re-created values, we can in some measure justify the principle
(323) brought forward first by German methodologists and recognized more or less generally since—the principle of axiological selection of historical object-matter. Since the ultimate problem of history is not theoretic study, but real preservation and revival of historical objects in their empirical concreteness, it is only natural if each historian, each nation, each epoch, tends to reproduce first of all historical objects which seem to them most worth preserving because of the influence which they still may have upon future cultural life when historically revived. The danger of such a selection, if too uniformly and consistently pursued, lies only in an undue limitation of the field for a time, which may result in a general narrowing of the cultural interests and views of the individual or the group; this danger is particularly imminent if the standards of selection, instead of being sincerely accepted as purely personal or national, are claimed to be absolute. German historiography of the nineteenth century and the consequences of its influence on the social and cultural life of the German nation constitute perhaps the best known and most radical proof of the importance of this danger.
In so far as the problem of the actual historical reproduction of any selected historical object or set of objects is concerned, several methodological questions are raised which cannot be discussed here in detail. The first, chief point is that, since the ideal of history is the revival of past reality as it was and a total reproduction of concrete historical objects in their whole content and meaning is practically impossible, history must try to reproduce at least all those characteristics of each concrete individual historical object which were most important at the time of its full realness; that is, those in which its own determination by other objects and its influence on other objects were most widely and most durably manifested. This has nothing to do with the application of the concept of type to historical reality (Rickert), which results not in general historical reproduction of the concrete but in special sociological theoretic reconstruction. The second
(324) point is the necessity, imposed by the same ideal, of avoiding as far as possible all additions to the reproduced historical object and of determining its content and its meaning in a way which as closely as possible reproduces its past determinations. This possibility is also limited by the very fact that, in order to have a cultural object which no longer belongs to our sphere of reality actually given, we must often in some measure re-create its content with the help of now given contents; but the arbitrariness of our reproduction can be indefinitely diminished by taking the historical object in connection with other objects of the same period and the same domain of concrete extension, by reproducing it as an element of a whole past civilization and thus supplementing the deficiencies in the reproduction of its contents by a more exact determination of its meaning as it really was. It is always difficult to trace the exact dividing line between re-creation and new creation; history will always border on art, and often may pass the border. But their methodological tendencies as conditioned by their ideals are different; precisely because history does not want to be art but intends to reproduce pre-existing reality, it makes use of scientific concepts which art in its desire for creation of new reality must ignore.
In every empirical historical investigation we find both intentions characterized above—that of preparing materials for some science and that of reviving historical objectsmore or less intimately coexisting. Historical preparation of scientific materials demands reproduction of the past with more or less concreteness, and reproduction of the past with the help of scientific concepts is possible only by a synthesis of various abstract aspects of past historical objects. Not the result of historical investigation at a given stage, but the direction in which it progresses, characterizes it either as a preparatory, scientific activity or as a specifically practical, re-creative activity. It is the former, if we see it progress
(325) from the concrete historical chaos toward a rational systematization of phenomena determined from the standpoint of some theoretic order; it is the latter if it advances from a provisional systematic organization of phenomena in accordance with various theoretic orders toward a reproduction of the concrete historical chaos. Only in the first case it is essentially scientific; but then the order which it introduces is always a specific, limited, abstract order, one of those which we have outlined above. In the second case, though it uses science, it consists in empirically practical, not in ideally theoretic, creation and the realization of this aim is the more perfect, the more exactly the chaotic historical reality is reproduced. Thus history cannot furnish us with a universal theoretic order of concrete reality independent of its practical organization and superior to all special scientific orders, since in so far as it is theoretic, it must treat concrete reality from the standpoint of some abstract and special scientific order; whereas in so far as it tends to embrace reality in its historical concreteness, it is not theoretic and does not order it at all.
THE INSTRUMENTAL RUE OF SCIENCE
We have considered knowledge in its reference to the practical organization of reality as to its object-matter. But in speaking of historical reproduction we have already approached a different connection between theory and practice, which is the opposite of the former; the results of science can become the object-matter of all kinds of practical activity. This question has become actual particularly because of the emphasis put by pragmatism upon the practical application of knowledge, and we regret the necessity of dividing it and limiting ourselves exclusively top that side of it which concerns the role played by ready scientific ideas in the construction of practical systems, postponing to a later time the connection between practical and theoretic activities as such, and in
(326) particular the question whether and how theoretic activity originates and develops in the course of practical activity and vice versa. In whatever way a scientific idea has been produced, whether for the satisfaction of a practical need or for the realization of theoretic ideal, it certainly can be taken out of the theoretic system of which it is a part and used for practical purposes. The problem is what this use consists in and how it influences the theoretic and the practical organization of reality.
It is evident, first of all, that theoretic ideas are used exclusively in the non-instrumental period of activity during which the system of reality—the future situation, and similarly also the future schematic system of situations, and the future dogmatic system of schemes—is constructed; but as yet it is constructed only "mentally"; it has not passed into the state when instruments begin to be used for the realization of the determined aim on the ground of the selected pre-existing reality. This period, during which the aim is being determined and the materials and instruments chosen, is, as we have seen, practically qualified as subjective as against the period of instrumental realization. Of course, when we speak of it as of a definite period, preceding the period of instrumental realization, it does not mean that all the "subjective" activities must be performed necessarily before any "objective," instrumental activities can start, since in fact they usually overlap each other more or less; noninstrumental activities are scattered among instrumental activities and vice versa; but the more rationally organized activity becomes, the more clearly are the mental and instrumental acts segregated, and the more distinct is their separation in time. When the first, non-instrumental part of practical activity makes use of theoretic ideas, this use is called planning, and the second, instrumental part assumes, with reference to the plan superimposed upon the practical organization of reality, the character of fulfilment.
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In planning, the theoretic idea is used as a specific instrument by which the connections mentally established between the objects, or systems of objects, from which a system is constructed acquire at once an objectivity intermediary between a simple actual "imagined" connection and one already realized with the help of other instruments in the practical world. The connection established with the help of ideas does not cease to be dependent on thought, does not resolve itself into static properties and relations, or a causally conditioned process; but, although dependent on active thought for its actual realization, it is founded on the rational order of reality as to the meaning and content which it gives to the connected objects. Planning, while still qualified practically subjective in so far as actually performed by an individual, has at the same time an objective aspect in so far as the individual, while performing it, acts on the ground of his knowledge of the objectively organized and rationally determined reality.
The idea can play the rôle of an instrument for planning because of its double character, both ideal and real. As objectivated thought, it can be actualized in its essential content at any moment, while on the other hand its content, being based on a more or less wide area of rationally determined reality, transcends the actual spheres of experience and reflection of the individual who actualizes it, and being objectively stabilized in its generality is very little dependent on the particular modification which the individual may give to it in the course of his present experience and reflection. Therefore, by treating the particular object actually given to him as an element of a theoretically defined class embraced by an idea and by determining its content and meaning on the ground of this idea, as supplementing and controlling his present experience and reflection, the individual raises this determination above the limitation of the here and now and makes it independent of any "nonessential" con-
(328) -nections which the unique and irrational development of his personality may bring with it.
Of course, the individual's determination of practical objects is always made with regard to his actual practical intention and in connection with other present objects. It is always only a certain aspect of the given object, or system of objects, that he is interested in—the aspect by which this object can be incorporated into the situation which he wants to construct or by which this system can become a part of some wider system that he is planning. The constructive side of planning always is and remains practical; the aim is spontaneously qualified, the practical materials and instruments spontaneously selected, by practical, not by theoretic reflection. But every practical determination given to an object with reference to other objects, every practical qualification of the aim with reference to the already selected and defined instruments and materials, every choice and practical definition of a material or an instrument relative to other materials and in view of the aim as already determined, are subjected in perfectly purposeful activity to the theoretically reflective control of ideas, to theoretic criticism. Any practical determination which cannot be justified theoretically, which cannot be treated as a particular application of a general idea or of a synthesis of general ideas, but seems merely the result of the concrete actual set of personal tendencies and experiences, is excluded as subjective, as unwarranted by the rational order of reality, and only those determinations are admitted into the plan which have stood the theoretic test. The plan is the common result of practical production and theoretic criticism; on its ideal side it represents an expurgated theoretic reconstruction, a model copy of the actual practical system of objects on the ground of which the aim is h be realized] on its real side, it is an objective, perfectly rational order introduced into the partly subjective, imperfectly rational organization of reality which the individual,
(329) or a number of co-operating individuals, has actually reached at the moment when his aim is ready, his instruments and materials selected, and fulfilment begins. The real empirical organization as we find it in practical life, is, of course, never completely identical with the plan, in that it always contains practical features which would not stand the test of theoretic criticism; but such features are not supposed to influence instrumental activity; the practical problem which the latter will solve is supposed to be entirely expressed in the plan.
When activity passes to the fulfilment of the plan, this fulfilment becomes in turn a practical test of the applicability of the ideas which have been used in building the plan, to the particular practical conditions to which they have been applied. The plan is evidently realizable only if it takes fully and adequately into account the pre-existing real nature of the instruments and materials in their reciprocal relation with regard to the realization of the given aim. An idea may be based on such characters of the empirical object or system of objects as either do not possess a sufficient degree of reality to serve for the realization of the given aim, or else, even if sufficiently real, are irrelevant for the given practical situation, or group of situations, because they do not correspond to the requirements of other objects, or systems, on which the realization of the aim will be based. The first case is found, for instance, if the savage, in his plan of a technical situation, makes use of his knowledge of the magical properties of things. The magical properties are not entirely unreal since they have at least a recognized existence within the spheres of experience and reflection of the given social group for many generations; the degree of their realness is quite sufficient to reach with their help an economic, a political, a religious aim, but it is not on the same level with that of physical properties and therefore, since a technical aim requires instruments with a high degree of realness, their introduction into a technical situation is a mistake. The
(330) second type of mistake is committed, for instance, when an inexperienced technical worker selects for the given technical situation a certain kind of material on the ground of his general knowledge of such physical properties of this class of material as may have served to realize the given aim in other situations in connection with different other materials and with the help of different instruments, but are of no use in the present situation because they are not the properties which this material is required to possess in view of the nature of the instruments and of other materials which are in this particular situation at the disposal of the worker.
But those mistakes are practical failures, not theoretic errors. The mistake does not consist in judging that the given objects as members of a class possess properties which they do not possess, for they do possess them in some degree at least, since these properties have entered into the definition of the class to which these objects belong; but it does consist in trying to use them on the ground of these properties for the realization of a certain practical aim in connection with certain other pre-existing objects with which they cannot be used for this purpose. Theoretic reflection can show only whether, by assuming the possession of certain properties by certain objects, I am "illusioning myself"; that is, whether these objects possess these properties only within the limits of my present personal experience and reflection, or whether these objects are "really" such as they seem to be here and now; whether they belong to a class whose members are known as endowed with these particular properties in the already existing rational order of reality. But what use I shall make of objects endowed with these properties in my present practical activity, after having found that my view of them is theoretically justified, is a purely practical problem.
The whole question is the same when it concerns relations, processes, or groups of interrelated objects and series of processes included in a situation. I can, for example, test
(331) theoretically the assumption that a certain process is the cause of another process; how to make use of this knowledge in practice, how to construct a situation in which this causal relation will be actually realized and, being realized, will contribute to the attainment of a definite end, is not a matter of knowledge, and my success or failure has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of my theoretic idea. All the determinations of things, processes, relations, constituting a practical situation may be each separately tested by theoretic reflection, and they are thus tested in building a perfect plan; but how this plan can be practically fulfilled in its totality, whether all this information of detail is so combined in the plan as to make the planned situation practically solvable now and here, is evidently not the business of the science to which we owe this information.
Our theoretic control may, indeed, go farther still, and we may test theoretically the objectivity and rationality of the whole situation, the practical method of combining all the theoretically tested elements of the situation, of stating and solving this particular practical problem; we make then a theoretic criticism of the situation. But it is beyond the reach of our theory whether, when, and how this situation, as theoretically tested both with regard to its elements and with regard to their combination, will be practically realized. It is the task of practice to create the auxiliary situations necessary for the construction of this main situation, and it is a practical mistake if we begin to construct a schematically determined situation, whether theoretically tested or not, without having the possibility of preparing all that is necessary for its realization. The same thing repeats itself on higher stages of theoretic control which, to be practically efficient, must be dominated by and subordinated to still wider and more complete practical organizations. When in carrying out a plan all of whose parts have been tested by theoretic reflection, we succeed or fail in attaining the expected result, our success or failure is not a
(332) test of the validity of our knowledge, but of our ability to use our knowledge for the given practical purposes; it does not show whether our ideas are practically applicable or not, but whether in the practical construction of our plan, we have selected ideas which are utilizable in the given practical conditions and combined them in a way which makes the whole plan practically realizable within the given sphere of practical reality. Science cannot organize practice: it can only furnish ideas—instruments by using which practice may spontaneously attain at once a higher level of rationality, provided it selects for its planning in each particular case the proper ideas and uses them in the proper way.
Of course, if we take a certain set of practical problems from the standpoint of these problems theoretic ideas may be classified into useful, directly or indirectly, and useless. Thus, from the standpoint of material technique ideas bearing on the physical order of things and processes are directly utilizable, whereas among those concerning the psychological, sociological, ideal orders some can be used only indirectly, and others not at all. Ideas must also express general and permanent empirical characteristics of the reality of a certain order if we want them to be widely and permanently applicable; thus, the idea of a physical property which is seldom found in experience, or that of a psychological datum or attitude which is peculiar to some supernormal or subnormal individuals, is of little practical use. Finally, at a certain level of practical organization only ideas below a certain degree of abstractness are valuable, whereas others whose practical significance would appear only if practical activity reached a systematic unity permitting the subordination of many particular situations and schemes to a common fundamental dogma, remain provisionally classed as purely speculative, that is, as having no other significance than that of helping to systematize theoretic ideas. Thus, when material technique in Greece was disconnected and
(333) chaotic, as is social technique at the present moment, the speculations of philosophers about the composition of matter had no practical interest whatever; whereas now the discussion between atomism and energetism assumes more and more practical importance as bearing on the way of stating and solving theoretic problems which in the present condition of technique evidently are or will be practically utilized.
The effects which the practical application of scientific ideas has upon the development of the practical organization of reality is thus due not to a substitution of theoretic activity for practical activity in organizing situations, schemes, and systems of schemes, but to the fact that practical activity, by using the results of theoretic activity as instruments for planning, can reach more rapidly a higher degree of rationality in the organization which it gives to its object-matter. The rôle of the idea is exactly similar in this respect to that of any other instrument: it does not diminish the demands put on practical creation; it does not allow us to dispense with any practical organizing efforts; but it helps to increase the efficiency of these efforts and thus, on the one hand, to economize innumerable trials and repetitions in reaching a certain organization, and on the other hand to widen the sphere of possible achievements.
The scientific idea or system of ideas corresponds in every field, as we have seen, to the highest degree of rational perfection which the practical organization of reality has reached in the given line; more than this, not satisfied with the rational order already produced, it gives practical activity the incentive to create still more perfect systems, by having it prepare with the help of practical instruments—collect, classify, isolate—fragments of reality for theoretic observation, and particularly by inducing it to experiment. In this way, when in planning a practical situation we use theoretic definitions for the objects included in it, when in creating a scheme we define theoretically in advance the situations in
(334) which it will be realized, when in producing a dogmatic system of schemes we express those schemes in abstract theoretic concepts instead of limiting ourselves to practical concrete experiences and activities, in each of these cases we shape the constitutive parts of our present practical organization in accordance with a rational model and are thus able to give them at once a definiteness, a generality, and a permanence of determination which otherwise they could attain only after numerous repeated practical attempts. Compare, for instance, the rapidity with which any new branch of mechanical technique reaches now an almost perfect rational organization with the slow perfecting of all industries in primitive societies or even, using a modern example, of agriculture everywhere until a hundred years ago.
The second effect of the use of ideas, the widening of the range of practical creation, is directly due to the scientific systematization of knowledge. This systematization in each science unifies in a body a vast complexity of rational forms of reality which in the historical world are scattered all over concrete duration and extension and half-absorbed in the irrational chaos of experience. It offers thus for each practical task a large choice of ready models, easily accessible and easily understood in their reciprocal rational connections. Precisely because scientific idealization of practical reality does not follow the pre-existing real order, but takes its own object-matter, practically simple or practically complicated, without regard to the practical system to which it belongs, and puts it into connection with others with which it never was connected practically, scientific ideas when used in planning make an unlimited number of new practical combinations possible. By their scientific meaning which they obtain while being theoretically connected with other ideas, they suggest to the practical worker such possibilities of reshaping and intercombining given practical objects and practical systems as the already existing practical organization of
(335) reality could never suggest. The practical organization left alone would tend to a perfect stability, to an exclusion of all imprevisible change as antirational. But when it begins to use theoretic ideas as its object-matter, it finds there a rational order completely different from its own and yet bearing upon its own, which allows it to produce new types of organization, by their very appearance substituting themselves in active experience for the old types without, however, annihilating the systematic order of the latter which, once constructed, cannot cease to exist. Thus, not only the rationalization of any new practical system is incomparably more rapid, owing to the use of ideas, but the rapidity with which new systems appear increases in an enormous proportion with the growing application of theory to practice. Compare the record of technical inventions now and a thousand years ago, or the development of material technique with that of social technique.
But besides these well-known utilitarian consequences, the practical application of theoretic ideas has a less popularly emphasized but not less important effect in bringing step by step a progressive, though imperfect, practical realization of the theoretic orders in the empirical historical world. We have seen that the degree of reality which a theoretic order can acquire in being imposed upon empirical reality by theoretic thought cannot become very high as compared either with the old concrete complexes of historical objects or with the highly real instrumental organization of practical systems. When, however, a theoretic generalization of things, situations, schemes, established on the ground of their uniformity, becomes the foundation of a practical reflective tendency to treat in the future these things, situations, schemes, as uniform in various practical systems, then the theoretic class is something more, besides being a product and a ground of scientific reflection: it is a constitutive element of some practical scheme. When further a theoretic system of ideas becomes
(336) practically used to establish repeatedly between objects, situations, schemes of various classes, such connections as exist between their ideas, the system is something more than a theory: it is also a constitutive part of some practical dogma. In this way, the theoretic order becomes imposed upon the world by practice with the help of practical instruments. This imposition is indeed fragmentary and proceeds not from the higher theoretic generalizations down to particular concepts and ideas, but from particular ideas and concepts of a very limited complexity up to those more comprehensive generalizations which practical life at a given stage of its development can already use for planning. It is impossible to study this evolution thoroughly without going into much historical detail; but its significance will be sufficiently suggested by a few considerations.
On the ground of practical organization alone there is no reason why, for instance, in an industrial system the technical schemes should be treated as belonging more closely together than the economic or legal schemes actually used and without which the continual working of the given system of industry would be as impossible as without proper technical methods. Furthermore, from the practical standpoint there certainly is no original connection whatever between the technical schemes used in different industries and in various countries. But science creates the concept of a purely material reality to which economic and legal schemes as such do not belong, and scientific theories of material reality are used as instruments for practical planning. This brings with it the creation of new practical connections. The scientific methodological conception of one material reality subjected to one order, a conception developed in the details of scientific research and systematization, becomes the ground of a practical tendency to treat various technical schemes as bearing upon the same domain of reality, and therefore as interconnected with each other more closely than with
(337) economic or legal schemes, independently of the actual organization of particular, empirically given, industrial systems. The idea of one material technique arises as an expression of this tendency; there is a new practical dogma more or less clearly formulated and resulting in the establishment of innumerable practical connections between the technical organizations of various industries, in various countries, under various economic conditions; technique slowly becomes practically, not only theoretically, one domain; and reality as object-matter of technique becomes also in some measure one material world from the practical standpoint.
Furthermore, the possibility of practically substituting in some cases purely technical schemes for a combination of technical and social schemes, that is, of introducing machine work instead of human work, generalized by the growing application of science and theoretically founded on the conception of the methodological unity and formal homogeneity of physical nature, leads to a conscious practical tendency, manifesting itself all through technical life: the tendency to substitute everywhere machine work for human work and to exclude almost entirely social schemes from industrial activities. A parallel tendency working in the social field, at this moment rather inadequately expressed in the socialistic ideal, permits us to foresee a gradual practical separation of problems concerning control of nature from those concerning control of society. Such a separation, in so far as effected, will realize in practice the theoretic distinction of the physical from the social order, and result in a deeper and deeper systematic practical organization of the former in accordance with the postulates of physical science.
Similar examples are found in the sphere of personal life. Psychological reflection, when applied to the solution of practical personal problem, produces a rationalization of personal experiences completely different from their original practical organization; see, for instance, the practical influence
(338) of ancient stoical and epicurean doctrines. Perhaps the most striking case of practical realization of a theoretic order is the fact that the very concept of psychological consciousness as of a distinct domain of reality has been so generally accepted as a practical dogma and has such a high degree of reality that philosophical reflection may show its relativity without being able to counterbalance its influence on practical life. However, in this case we have certainly to discount the rôle of religious factors.
It is evident, in general, that only a long empirical investigation can show to what a degree in any given domain theoretic thought has succeeded not only in superimposing its order over the practical organization of reality as a purely "mental" systematization of experience, but also in imposing, though only fragmentarily, its order upon the results of practical activity by having its ideas and systems realized as components of practical systems and with the help of practical instruments. But, whether more or less far-reaching, the realization of the theoretic order in practice is possible only because of the fact that fragments of this order—ideas and systems of ideas—are the object-matter of practical activity, are isolated from their ideal content, incorporated into dynamic practical systems and used by practical reflection for practical purposes as instruments of planning. In the same way, as we have seen, the idealization of the practical organization of reality is possible only because fragments of this organization—objects and systems of objects—are the object-matter of theoretic activity, are isolated from their real content and incorporated into theoretic systems. The relation between the theoretic and the practical rationality of the world is strictly reciprocal. Each influences the other, but only by being passively used as instrument or as material for the other's construction and development.
THE GENERAL FEATURES OF THEORETIC RATIONALIZATION
The imperfect and multiform organization of reality super-constructed by practical activity upon the world 'of concrete historical objects serves in turn as a foundation for a new superstructure, the rational order which knowledge imposes upon its object-matter.
We cannot, of course, give here a complete theory of knowledge which presupposes a general theory of activity and constitutes the most arduous task of philosophy. We shall limit ourselves to the minimum of indications necessary to understand the connection between knowledge and reality in so far as it affects the latter.
The fundamental points which must be kept in mind are that, on the one hand, knowledge constitutes itself a part of cultural reality, the domain of ideas, each of which has a content drawn from some other reality and a meaning due to its connection with other ideas; and that, on the other hand, each idea is objectified and stabilized thought, which at any moment can be actualized again as thought, as an activity of which reality is the object-matter. As a reality, the domain of ideas has a rational organization of its own, whose character is formally practical, that is, which manifests itself in situations, schemes, and dogmas, just as the rational organization of technical or political reality; and there is a special activity, which might be called theoretically practical, if such a term did not seem stranger still than that of ideal reality, which we have used to distinguish the domain of ideas from all other reality. The task of this activity is to create new ideas, both on the ground of real data and on
(231) the ground of pre-existing ideas. The instruments of this creation, with the help of which ideas become fixed and incorporated into the pre-existing ideal reality, are symbols, and the complexes of pre-existing ideas organized for the creation of new ideas are systems of knowledge. A system of knowledge, once ready, may be time after time actualized as a system of active thoughts bearing upon reality, and thus produce a more or less wide and complicated systematization of reality, which, since it does not tend to create any new objects within the reality upon which the actualized system of knowledge bears and includes no instruments, can be called a theoretic systematization in the original sense of the term, that is, a systematization by observation.
Now, this systematic theoretic order imposed by knowledge upon reality is not a copy, a reproduction of the systematic organization which knowledge finds ready and constructed by practical activity. A system of objects may be practically reproduced in the sense of being constructed again, as a schematic situation is, time after time; we know reproduction in this sense from the preceding sections and we hardly need to mention that the practically, even if only mentally, reproduced system is always still a practical system—technical, political, etc. — and not knowledge of a system. Or a system of objects may be reproduced in concrete experience without being practically followed in its organization, as a more or less complex datum; but such a "representation" of a system is not a knowledge of this system, but is this system itself becoming an object, an element of experience, with a given content and a meaning which it acquires in actuality. Reproduction in this sense, as a mere introduction of the system as a datum into the present sphere of experience and reflection, t not knowledge, any more than the reappearance of any object "in memory" is; we may call it acquaintance with the system, but acquaintance is only making objects accessible to individual theoretic
(232) activity, collecting materials out of which knowledge still has to be built. And when knowledge is built, both the way in which its elements or ideas are determined and the way in which they are systematized are completely different from the pre-existing determination and systematization of the objects upon which these ideas are based.
The content of the idea is, indeed, drawn from reality, since nothing but reality can be given; and yet the idea is not the reality which is its object-matter, but is objectified thought about this reality. This seeming contradiction, the necessity and the apparent impossibility of distinguishing the idea from its object-matter, has been one of the main stumbling-stones of the philosophy of knowledge, and there lies the source of that strange conception of ideas being subjectively psychological copies of objects, similar in content but different in being from their originals. This conception was the more readily accepted since it fell in with the practical distinction between real and unreal elements of practical activity of which we have spoken in the preceding chapter, and since moreover (a point which we shall discuss later) theoretic ideas when used for practical purposes are mostly actualized during the first period of activity when the aim is being constructed but waits to be realized, and when therefore activity is taken to be only mental from the standpoint of the second, instrumental, period. When, however, the study of concrete historical reality has forced us to reject the concept of representations as subjective copies of objects, we must search for a different and less arbitrary distinction between ideas and the reality from which they are drawn.
The whole difficulty comes from the prepossession that knowledge reproduces reality in its pre-existing determination and systematization, whereas the very difference between knowledge and its object-matter, and thus the very existence of knowledge as something distinct from its object-matter,
(233) are empirically manifested precisely in the specific and original determination and systematization which it gives to its object-matter. The act of thought which is the ideal ground of an idea cannot be given as object-matter, but its real results can be, and it is by its results as differing from the results of other acts that we recognize it and define it. In order to objectivate it as an idea, to oppose the idea as a specific object to the original object-matter of the act of thought, we must isolate the result of this act from the total concrete reality, stabilize it, raise it above the historical extension and duration of the sphere of experience to which it belongs. This is called theoretic idealization and requires the use of the symbol. The symbol is a real pre-existing object with which the given result of a theoretic act of thought becomes connected and, in so far as taken in this connection alone, can be treated as an object independent of its empirical context, and not as a mere modification of other objects. But that empirical result of the theoretic act, that real datum which the symbol helps to idealize, must be in some way different from the results of practical acts which construct practical systems of objects; otherwise there would be no difference between theory and practice. A symbolic connection is not limited to the field of knowledge; in fact, every concrete object might be called a symbol in that it has a meaning which suggests acts that lead to other empirical objects. A symbol in the special and definite sense of the term is characterized by the fact that it expresses an idea; but it can express an idea also only by suggesting acts which lead to some object-matter, and therefore the specific empirical difference which characterizes the symbol as a theoretic instrument must come directly from that object-matter which it symbolizes. In fact, the formation of an idea implies as the first and indispensable condition the establishment of a connection between the given property, relation, thing, process, or even
(234) a whole system, if the latter in its entirety becomes the object-matter of knowledge, and other properties, relations, things, processes, systems, outside of the organization of reality of which the given object-matter is a part. This connection consists in the production, or reproduction, of a uniformity, that is, a community of determination between the objects which are being connected, quite independently of any differences which they may possess in the different real systems to which they respectively belong. Using traditional terms, we shall say that the first condition, the starting-point of the formation of an idea is abstraction and generalization. It is abstraction, in so far as the given object of theoretic thought, in order to be connected with other objects on the ground of uniformity, has to become isolated from the whole real systematic organization to which it belongs; it is generalization, in so far as it can be isolated from the real practical system of which it is objectively a part only by being connected with other objects outside of this system on the ground of some common determination, by being taken as one particular empirical manifestation of a super-systematic uniformity.
This uniformity of properties, relations, processes, things, systems, outside of their respective organizations, even in so far as it exists previous to theoretic thought, is clearly not a real relation or even a pre-existing practical connection between them, but the result of the fact that they have been determined in a similar way each in its particular organization; that a certain similar kind of connection has been at various times and in various places established between each of these objects which we generalize and some other objects which may be quite different from case to case. The source of this uniformity of objects can therefore be only an ideal uniformity of the acts which have determined them, and the theoretic thought which connects objects on the ground of their uniformity follows in fact the traces that certain
(235) ideal characteristics of active thought have left upon the reality which this active thought has created in the past. But the full demonstration of this proposition belongs with the theory of active thought.
What is evident here is that the isolation and subordination of the particular to the general by which, using particular real data as material, we construct the content of an idea does not correspond to any pre-existing real order. In practical reality, as we have seen, all direct rational determination of objects is within a situation, and if objects present similar characteristics, it is as inseparable elements of situations, not as variations of common real essences. An actually given object appearing in individual experience may be indeed a particular variation of the total concrete historical object; but a particular property, relation, process, thing, is not really a variation of more general property, relation, process, or thing; and if a system may be considered as a variation of some other system, it is only if taken with regard to its form, to the nature of its organization as determined by the same kind of active thought and not with regard to the real matter it contains.
The content of an idea is thus constructed as a unity of all these particular determinations of reality which become connected by theoretic thought on the ground of their uniformity, as variations of one more general determination. We know, of course, that theoretic thought seldom, if ever, actually embraces all the particular determinations which may be subordinated to the same general determination, all the "particulars" of a "universal"; but in so far as the idea can be actualized again and again, the system of determinations which it creates may be said to contain virtually all the particular determinations of this common form which will ever be found in experience. Between the content of several ideas again some more general uniformity may be found and these ideas subordinated to one common idea
(236) whose content is directly constituted as a unity of their contents and indirectly as a unity of all these determinations of reality which they have unified.
The content of the idea roots thus in reality by the nature of its materials, but rises above and outside of reality by the nature of the unification of these materials, to which no real systematic unity of objects corresponds, only an ideal uniformity of the acts that have determined them in the past, which is the genetic source of the common form of these objects, though the latter belong to different real systems. And the more general an idea, the more evident is the lack of any pre-existing real connection between the determinations which are unified in it, the more indubitable the ideal ground of this unification; if anyone should doubt whether empirical "rednesses" or empirical "tables" are not interconnected really, there can be hardly any doubt, except on the ground of mediaeval realism, that only a common form, no real bond, unifies all the empirical "colors" or empirical "pieces of furniture," when theoretic thought begins to connect them as members of a class.
But it is not enough to give to the idea a content; it must acquire a meaning for science, become a full element of the ideal reality by being connected with other pre-existing ideas. Only by this connection, as part of a system of ideas, its content becomes definitively stabilized and determined as independent—on its ideal, if not on its real side—of the concrete evolution of reality in extension and duration, so that the real data on which it is based may evolve and even completely disappear from actual experience, while the idea will persist together with the system of knowledge into which it has been incorporated. In so far as ideas must be expressed in symbols, since without a symbol a thought cannot be objectivated as an idea, symbols are also indispensable instruments of the systematization of ideas, because actual connections of ideas can become stable relations only if
(237) expressed in relations of symbols; at the same time the meaning of the symbol itself, as of an instrument, can be stabilized completely only by this use in relation with other instruments symbols to express a system of ideas.
The systematic connection by which ideas acquire their scientific meaning is, of course, not subordination of the relatively particular to the relatively general, since this already determines their content, but analytic or synthetic subsumption of the relatively concrete to the relatively abstract. A system of ideas is either the product of an analysis of an idea into several different ideas, which are precisely therefore assumed to be simple within the limits of this system, or the product of a synthesis from several different ideas of an idea, which is precisely therefore assumed to be compound within the limits of this system.
We use the term concept exclusively to indicate an idea which is, and in so far as it is, analyzed into or synthetized from other ideas. The concept is clearly not exhausted by the ideas into which it is analyzed, nor is it fully created by a synthesis of other ideas. It must always have a content of its own independent of these ideas, which cannot be obtained otherwise than by the observation of reality and is always a unity of uniform empirical determinations common to many real data; if it has no real foundation, it has no content and therefore is not a distinct idea but a mere complex of different ideas. The analysis or synthesis is not supposed to determine its content, but to give this content a meaning, to establish a connection between it and other ideas; in analysis its content has been already created beforehand, whereas in synthesis it remains empirically unknown and will have to be created by empirical observation after its meaning has been determined, and thus after certain rational conditions have been imposed on this creation. On the other hand, the ideas into which the concept is analyzed or from which it is synthetized are not exhausted by their connection
(238) with the concept; each of them has an empirical content which would remain even if the concept were not there and which may serve for the analysis or synthesis of many other concepts; the connection with the concept and with the other ideas into which the concept is analyzed gives only a definite scientific meaning to the given content of the idea. If it has no content drawn from reality independently of the concept, then it is not a separate idea but a mere part of the concept.[ 1]
A concept which has been or will be analyzed into or synthetized from other ideas can, as we know, play the part of a simple idea, an element of analysis or synthesis, with regard to some other concept; and vice versa, an idea which was treated as simple element in one system may become an analyzed concept in another. In this way, indefinitely complicated scientific systems may be constructed by a hierarchical subsumptive organization.
What is the connection between this systematic order of ideas and the pre-existing organization of reality? We see, indeed, that just as the content of particular ideas has a foundation in reality, so the relation between ideas as manifested in synthesis and analysis is based upon reality as upon its original material. The relation between the concept of a thing and the ideas of properties into which it is analyzed has its real ground in the coexistence of the properties corresponding to these ideas in the empirical things; the relations between ideas ,in the theoretic definition of the concept of a certain type of situations is founded upon the internal unity of each situation of this type as including certain really interrelated things and developing in certain teleologically or causally ordered processes; the relation of ideas in the
(239) theoretic definition of the concept of a certain type of scheme is drawn from the systematic organization of the situations as conditioned by each scheme of this type, etc. But the rational ground of the coexistence of properties in a particular thing, of the coexistence of things, relations, and processes in a particular situation, of the coexistence of situations in a particular scheme, is completely different from the rational ground of the systematic organization of the ideas of the properties as analytically or synthetically connected with the concept of a thing, of the organization of the ideas of things, relations, and processes as analytically or synthetically connected with the concept of a situation, of the organization of the ideas of situations as analytically connected with the concept of the scheme.
The empirically given thing has the properties which it has because it is determined with regard to other things contained in the situation; the concept of a thing is analyzed into certain ideas of properties because empirical things belonging under this concept, which on the ground of a certain common form that they possess have been made the material of this idea, possess properties of certain classes, none of which, however, is necessarily limited to things belonging under this concept but may be also found, with the same general form, in things belonging under other concepts. The empirically given particular situation contains the things, relations, processes, which it does contain because it is so determined with regard to other situations in the realization of a scheme; the concept of the situation is analyzed into certain ideas of things, relations, processes, because the empirical situations of a certain class, which, on the ground of a common form or a similarity of organization which they possess, are the material of one idea, include things, relations, processes, whose common forms can be found empirically manifested not only in situations of this class, but also in situations of other classes. And so on. In short, science can indeed
(240) reconstruct theoretically any empirical, practically rational organization of reality, but only by isolating it from the wider organization by which it is determined, by ignoring the real factors which made it what it is, by taking it as granted, as self-existing material of a concept.
Then, having thus severed the real links which unified it with a wider system of reality, it determines its entire constitution from the standpoint of an entirely different rational systematization. just as in the formation of an idea each particular empirical datum which constitutes its real material becomes connected with many other empirical data which present the same general form, to whatever systems they may belong, so in the formation of a system of ideas each particular empirical organization which is its material becomes variously and more or less closely connected with many other empirical organizations, with which it may have had no real connection whatever but whose elements present forms similar to those of the elements of the given organization. When an empirical situation becomes not only the object-matter of theoretic generalization but also that of theoretic analysis or synthesis, when it serves not only as the material of an idea but also as the material of a system of ideas in which its intrinsic practical organization will be theoretically reconstructed, then it not only becomes theoretically connected with those situations which have an organization similar to its own, and thus are taken as belonging to the same class, but also with all those situations which, however, they may differ from it in their general form, possess some particular things, relations, processes, formally similar to those things, relations, or processes which the given situation includes.
The same will happen on a higher level when theoretic thought undertakes to reconstruct the connections which it had at first ignored between the situation and other situations in a schematic system of situations. It will then
(241) have to reconstruct theoretically this schematic system of situations in its internal organization, and in doing this it will ignore the connections which may exist between this particular scheme and others, if this scheme is a part of some dogmatic system of schemes. Instead, it will first of all create an idea of a schematic system of situations of which the given one will be a particular case and thereby connect the latter, not with the schemes with which it is really connected, but with all those which present some characteristic uniformity. Then it will analyze this idea, taken as a concept, into ideas corresponding to the particular situations included in the schematic system and their reciprocal determinations, thus connecting the given schematic organization with all those which, even if perhaps completely different from it in their general form, include similar situations.
It may push this analysis still farther, analyze the idea of each situation, taken as a concept, into ideas corresponding to the particular things, relations, processes, included in these situations, and thus connect indirectly the schematic organization with all those that, even if their situations should be different, have at least similar things, relations, or processes within their situations.
Finally, if theoretic reconstruction reaches the dogmatic system of schemes, beyond which the real practical systematization never goes, or if in the given field practical organization has not yet reached a level of systematization higher than the situation or the scheme, then, of course, knowledge has no pre-existing practical connections to ignore; it only creates a new order, but always of a different type from the organization found in practical experience, always based on ideal uniformity instead of real determination. Of course, this creation of an order of reality different from the pre-existing practical systematization of this reality is not the aim of knowledge in the course of the construction of systems of ideas. The latter are constructed for the
(242) creation of new ideas, and while having a foundation in preexisting reality, present a rational organization of their own which, being the product of organized creative activity and resulting from the combination of various materials and instruments for the attainment of definite common results, has within itself the same fundamental forms as the organization of technical, hedonistic, political systems. But knowledge has the privilege of being not only a closed and specific organization of objects, but of being also able to become at any moment an organization of active thoughts which bear upon other fields of reality; and in this bearing, that is, not as static ideas but as dynamic thoughts, imposes upon these other fields of reality an order which these fields did not possess. A system of knowledge when applied to reality as object-matter of .actual theoretic reflection, when regulating our observation, establishes between the many real empirical data which are its object-matter a set of systematic connections, which like all connections have a certain objective realness. This theoretically imposed rationality cannot attain by itself the same degree of realness as a practically established organization, since theoretic thought when directly applied to reality uses no instruments. However, such as it is, it is evidently sufficiently real to influence in a very marked way our common empirical real world, and with the growth and systematization of knowledge, all the domains of historical reality which knowledge has influenced appear to us empirically more and more permeated with a type of rationality which can be only the product of theoretic reflection.
Now, the important feature of knowledge as system of thoughts bearing upon reality is that it makes the rational organization of reality ever wider and more perfect by continually tending, self-consciously or not, to the ideal of a complete theoretic rationalization of the real world. This ideal has found its most radical expression in those philo-
(243) -sophical theories which look upon the real world exclusively in the light of theoretic activity; however, it plays a more or less important part in every philosophy in so far as the latter attempts to give a consistent rational conception of reality as a whole, and in every particular science in so far as it tends to realize it within the particular domain of reality which constitutes its material.
The way in which this ideal is approached differs in various branches of knowledge in so far as some of them neglect entirely the rôle which practical activity has played in organizing the world and take only the last real results of this activity, treating them as self-existing and self-determined in their rationality, whereas others take into account and try to reconstruct theoretically some existing practical systems, either stopping at the situation, or rising to the scheme, or, finally, taking even the dogmatic system of schemes into consideration. Of course, each branch of knowledge, by the very nature of theoretic idealization, has to ignore whatever practical organizations there may be superior to the one which is its special object-matter: if its object-matter is things, relations, or processes, it ignores the situation, and a fortiori the scheme and the dogma; if it idealizes situations, it ignores schemes and dogmas; if its method is specially developed to study schemes, it ignores dogmas.
But whatever kind of organization is its object-matter, knowledge takes this organization as it is in those systems which have pushed it to the highest degree of perfection, and assumes that the rational form of this organization represents a type of rationality which is universally present, if not in all reality, at least in those sections whose order appears as more or less similar to the one accepted as a model.
More than this. Science often appeals to practical activity to construct especial artificial models of rational
(244) organizations in the form of classified collections or experiments, and takes these models as representative of the real order universally latent in empirical reality, or in certain parts of reality at least. Since, as a matter of fact, reality does not grow up to these expectations and lacks the necessary uniformity and perfection of order, science uses two assumptions to justify its claims: the assumption of approximation and that of interference. The first, found whenever we want to reconstruct theoretically a concrete fragment of reality with the help of abstract ideas, consists in accepting the general principle that, although reality does not present a perfect order, still it more or less approximates it, and the problem in each case is simply to determine the rational limits within which the imperfect rationality of experience can be placed. Thus, the variety of empirical organic bodies cannot be perfectly defined as constituting an ideally rational system of species, but an approximate systematization, based upon the assumption of a majority of average individuals approximately realizing the essential characters of the species, is rationally possible.
The other assumption, used when we analyze a concrete fragment of reality [2] into ideal abstract elements, consists in treating the imperfectly rational empirical object-matter as the product of an "accidental," purely matter-of-fact (explicable only by the total concrete reality) combination of perfectly rational real components which in this combination, interfering with each other, cannot manifest fully their several rational essences. No causal law needs ever to be exactly realized in experience because it is always possible to assume that its working has been interfered with in the given case by some other causal law, which
(245) in turn never needs to be perfectly applicable to unprepared experience because of other possible interferences, and so on indefinitely; whereas at the same time it is usually possible at least approximately to reconstruct practically the model situation, the isolated closed system within which it has proved to work, and thus to test it by experiment.
THE PHYSICAL ORDER
The theoretic ideal of the perfect rationality of the world, like every other ideal, continually evolves, and in every historical epoch as we well know finds expression in many partial, imperfectly interconnected and within themselves not always perfectly systematized, scientific and philosophical theories. But all these theories, whatever may be their object-matter and their own systematic organization, can be classified into a very limited number of types with regard to the general, categorical forms which they tend to impose upon reality. The origin of these categorical forms of theoretic reflection lies in the forms which reality acquires in those fundamental types of practical systems which we have studied above. These practical forms which in empirical reality are never perfect and develop only under very definite conditions, as we have seen in the preceding chapter, when generalized and idealized by science as categories become in their actual application to reality methodological presuppositions, helping to create perfectly rational systems of knowledge on the ground of an imperfectly rational reality, and thus to raise the latter also step by step to a higher level of rationality. If formulated as general affirmations about reality as a whole, justifying the belief in the attainment of the theoretic ideal by the assumption that reality is rational itself, they claim to be ontological truths a priori—a claim which, as we shall see, must be rejected.
The oldest and the most firmly established set of such methodological presuppositions, which precisely therefore
(246) has been most frequently ascribed an ontological validity whether with regard to absolute "noumenal" or to "phenomenal" reality only, is immaterial—is the one that constitutes the formal foundation of that branch of knowledge which ignores entirely practical systems and takes as its object-matter the ultimate elements of reality. These it treats as if they were all perfectly determined in perfect rational situations but without regard to the situations themselves to which they owe whatever determinations they really possess. This branch, to which all natural sciences of the material reality belong, without exactly splitting into two distinct parts, tends nevertheless to a division of problems into two groups, each of which presupposed an elementary order of reality of a somewhat different type. On the one hand we have a static order of things, properties, and relations; on the other hand, a dynamic order of causally determined processes. Let us examine the most frequent forms of each of these orders separately.
In the static order, processes which of course cannot be ignored also have to be logically stabilized; this is done by analyzing them into states of things, so that each process is taken as a succession of states. Now, a state is a property of the thing, and in this way the category of property is divided in two: permanent properties, qualities, including quantitative determinations when taken as belonging to the thing itself and not as expressing merely relations; and changing properties, states. This type of rationalism, as we have said, most frequently passes from a methodological to an ontological application of these categories, and it does this by an implicit or explicit reasoning which can be briefly resumed in this manner. Because any empirical complex of objects can be theoretically reconstructed as a rational system of things, qualities, states, and relations, all reality objectively is constituted by things, qualities, states, and relations. In the most radical philosophical expression of this ontologism the
(247) thing becomes a substance, the property an attribute, the state a modus.
The fundamental characteristics of the thing as objectmatter of theoretic reflection are: isolation from and limitation against other things, self-identity, independence of the actual connections within which it is taken. Now, these formal characteristics, which are ascribed to the thing for the purpose of present scientific reconstruction, can be assumed as belonging really and objectively to any particular thing in the measure in which this thing has been already fully determined within a static situation, so that no new determinations are supposed to be added to it by the total situation and thus, in defining theoretically the thing as now given and ready, we do not need to take the situation of which it is a part into account. But suppose now we ignore, not only for particular theoretic purposes, but absolutely, the fact that things are determined by special practical situations and are what they are only within the limits of these situations; suppose we claim that all the objects of which concrete empirical reality is composed are by themselves ontologically things or substances, isolated and limited, self-identical, independent of actual connections. What will be the consequences?
Isolation and limitation, if neither taken as dependent on practical activity which maintains the object as limited or distinct from others, because it makes it determined by others, nor as dependent on theoretic activity which reconstructs the object as isolated or separated from others, because others are ignored for the time of this reconstruction, but as absolute, real characteristics of the thing itself, as static features of reality, are possible only in space. We find in many empirical situations spatial order, more or less pure, substituted for concrete extension; but it is theoretic thought which, by ignoring the particular, variable, and practically limited character of each such empirical spatial organization, constructs the unique, absolute, homogeneous space as the
(248) common receptacle of objectively isolated and limited things, superimposing this abstract rational extension upon the concrete irrational extension of the historical world.
The thing becomes thus a material or quasi-material object, occupying one and only one position in pure extension at a given static moment and spatially separated from other objects; it is determined as this thing by its position in the one common space and the space which it occupies is determined by it. Extension becomes thus something external to the thing itself; the latter has only so much of it left as it possesses within one particular situation where it is supposed given only in one abstract objective here, and it is not entirely inextensive only because it is simultaneously determined from the standpoint of all the other objects included in the situation, each of which has its own distinct here. The theoretic thing is, like the concrete historical object, taken as element of an extensive reality, but since its own extension is limited in advance, its participation in the total extension of the world cannot be internal, based upon the intrinsic extensiveness of its own content and meaning, as it is in the case of the historical object, but external, consisting exclusively in its occupying a definite portion of the one rational space. Therefore, if something exactly similar in content can be localized simultaneously in two different positions of the one rational space, it is two different things. But since it is evidently impossible to substitute space for concrete extension as a milieu of all experiences, since the total empirical content and meaning of a concrete historical object, continually growing, can never be exhausted by any number of similar or dissimilar, specially localized, and rationally determined things, for all those variations of a concrete object which are not determined as isolated elements of perfect material situations and cannot be interpreted as things with definite spatial positions, theoretic reflection adopts a qualification which we have already found in practical organizations
(249) applied to particular fragments of empirical reality, but which in knowledge leads to a distinction cutting the whole world in two. The object which, having one position in rational space, is simultaneously present at various here's of the concrete extension, is taken as a complex of one thing and several subjective representations.
Similarly, the self-identity of the thing as logical subject-matter is theoretically justified by the fact that the thing in theoretic reflection, for the special purpose of the actually constructed system of ideas, is raised above change; and it is practically possible within the limits of one situation, if practical activity maintains this situation identical against the evolution of empirical reality. But the only way in which the thing could by its own virtue, independently of theoretic or practical activity, remain really, materially self-identical, would be if it were changeless in duration. Since, however, concrete duration is the product of activity and implies necessarily continual growth of historical reality, science has to substitute for this irrational duration a pure rational time, an empty form of existence which exists quite independently, whether objects in it change or remain changeless.
In this objective time the thing has a definite period of duration; it is at all only as long as it is self-identical, remains unchanged—unchanged, of course, in that which constitutes its objective nature as this thing; once changed, it is no more, and a different thing begins to exist instead. Thus, duration, like extension, is put outside of the thing whereas it is within the concrete historical object. Philosophy, by substituting the substance for the thing, goes still farther and denies even that the empty time, the pure external duration, is a receptacle of substances; it is only supposed to include the modi of the substance. A real substance therefore can have no beginning and no end. Remnants of this conception are found up to the present in the principles of conservation of matter and of energy. And in so far as the scientific order of
(250) self-identical things lasting for definite periods of time cannot cover empirical duration, in so far as an object continues or begins to exist in concrete duration after it ceased or before it began to exist as thing in rational time, the same distinction is applied as in the contrast between concrete and spatial extension. An object that is given before or after it had existed as a thing is a distinct phenomenon, a subjective representation of the thing.
Finally, the independence of the thing from the connections in which it is given is again logically justified in so far as, in idealizing the thing theoretically, in incorporating it into a system of ideas, we ignore all modifications which active thought, even our present theoretic reflection itself, may bring into its content and meaning by connecting it with other objects; it is possible really and practically in so far as practical activity makes the thing independent of all other determinations except those which it has received within the closed situation with reference to other things included therein. But as absolutely real characteristic of the thing, independence of all connections would be possible only if the thing, as long as self-identical possessed a complete self-sufficiency, if its relations to other things did not affect it in itself. This implies a complete externality of the relation to the thing. The thing as such cannot be affected by any relation; relation can influence only either its spatial position or the period of pure time in which it is localized, but not its own objective nature. The philosophical substance, for example, the monad of Leibniz, is not subjected to any relations whatever. Any dependence of the object on the empirical connections into which it is brought that does not destroy its self-identity and yet is not reducible to a mere change of localization in time or space is classed as subjective; if the thing is differently given in different connections, it is not that the thing has become a historical concrete object, which varies in varying complexes, but that there are various
(251) psychological copies of it, various mental images taken by different persons or by the same person at different moments. It is clear that a world of ontologically pure things— substances could be only the object-matter of aesthetic contemplation or intuition, not of scientific logical thought, which has to analyze and synthetize idealized things. But when we introduce into reality any ontological category supplementing that of the thing, this means that we are making a concession in favor of experience at the expense of rational consistency, that we have to deprive the thing-substance of its rational inviolability for the sake of the creation of an empirical science. Though there is no logical reason why anything that may disturb the rational perfection of the real thing-substance should not be put out of the way and transferred into the all-suffering and always ready psychological subject, yet as there could be then no science of empirical reality, some of these disturbances, in a proportion which varies from period to period and from science to science, are left with the objective theoretic order of reality to be accounted for. And thus, although things similar in some respects in strict logic cannot be taken as being in any sense objectively unified if they are spatially distinct and isolated from each other, still since things absolutely isolated and therefore absolutely unique would give no ground whatever for analysis, we must assume that their partial similarity is an objective link between them in spite of their spatial isolation. The common quality is objectively one in many things, overcomes their plurality, makes it less absolute. Since it exists simultaneously in spatially separated and distinct things, it is extensive, and yet not spatial, for it is not localized and isolated in space. Through it, a minimum of empirical extension is indirectly re-introduced into the things, which represents an intermediary stage between abstract spatiality and the full concrete extension.
(252)
While the quality of a thing within a particular situation possesses a reality of its own, but only as this particular quality determined from the standpoint of other things within this situation; while the idea of a quality possesses a generality of its own, is one in many objects, but only in so far as idealized, whereas its real basis is always a plurality of particular qualities in particular situations, the quality as ontological category must possess both the reality of the particular quality in a situation and the generality of the idea. It is real because it belongs to real things; it is one in all the things in which it is found because it is not in each case taken as the product of a situation, but as existing by itself. Thus, within the plurality of spatially isolated and limited things there must exist a plurality of general qualities cutting across the static order of things, having each a non-spatial unity and differentiated from others in that special way which we call precisely qualitative distinction. In philosophical rationalization these objective qualities are either mere empirical attributes of substances, if emphasis is laid on the absoluteness of the metaphysical substance, or self-existing metaphysical essences, if substances are treated as no more than empirical things. They are as self-identical in time and as independent of all connections as things. They can be rationally systematized, and their systematic order serves to define things rationally; as we know, ancient and mediaeval science was mainly science of qualities. A thing, to remain self-identical, must possess all the qualities by which it is defined; and therefore any empirical variation of an essential quality which is not a change of the thing is a subjective illusion. And unless the category of the state is also ontologically objectified, a strict rationalism of things and qualities which assumes a purely static order will classify as subjective all those properties which cannot serve to define things permanently, all nonessential qualities which a thing may alternatively possess
(253) or not possess while in all other respects remaining the same.
Of course, the introduction of the category of state, though ontologically it represents a new break in the rational perfection of the thing and even of the quality, is again indispensable if we wish to rationalize at least a part of the empirical processes on the ground of the static order of things. Now, the ontological state, like the ontological quality, possesses both the reality of the particular changing property within the situation and the generality of the idea of this property; it is objectively the same real state in all the things in which it may be found. But it does not simultaneously, or rather timelessly, coexist in various things; it may pass from thing to thing, and thus possesses a kind of concrete duration which is not merely the occupation of a certain period of pure time, but implies a becoming in the form of this very passage from thing to thing. In so far as a thing is subjected to certain states before or after other things, duration ceases to be completely external to it; the thing begins internally to participate in the duration of its states; it is becoming itself. Since, however, as a principle, a change of state is not supposed to affect the self-identity of the thing, its participation in concrete becoming is only superficial, is accidental, not essential to it. The passage of states from thing to thing appears as only a half-real becoming, a mh on, to use in this connection again the wonderfully expressive Platonic term, something that seems to be and yet rationally should not be. To make it completely real, it must be conceived as a manifestation of objectively real relations between things. A thing cannot acquire a new state by its own essence, but if the appearance of this new state is provoked from the outside by something that tends to disturb this essence, if it is a reaction to the action of another thing, it is in so far real even though, or rather because, the essence of the thing is not disturbed by it (Herbart). The action in this
(254) sense is, of course, itself a state of that other thing, appearing at a given moment of its existence. An empirically given state is ontologically real only if it is a link of a relation, either an action provoking a reaction or a reaction to an action. A modification of the content of an object which can be interpreted neither as determined by nor as determining another modification of the content of some other object is classed as merely subjective.
The ontological relation, real and affecting the thing, is thus a necessary supplement of the ontological state, and it is also indispensable if we want to take in some measure at least into account the modifications to which the content of the object is subjected in various connections. Thus, to the external and formal relations of space and time are added internal and material relations by which a thing is modified in its state under the influence of other things. These active, internal relations do not possess the real unity in plurality which is given by theoretic rationalization to qualities and states. In so far as real, a material relation between two things, manifested in a given action and reaction, is unique and particular, localized in space where the things are, localized in time as the respective states when they come to these particular things. A material relation between things in theoretic rationalization shares thus the uniqueness of the concrete active connection, without, of course, being treated any longer as the product of an act of thought. The very terms of action and reaction preserve the trace of the origin of this category in the actual determination of objects by human acts. But the physical relation is treated as real only in so far as it constitutes a determination of a state of one object by a state of another, just as vice versa a state is treated as real only if it is the link of a physical relation. Therefore the connection which lacks the reciprocity of determination implied in the principle of action and reaction, the actual connection by which only the content of one
(255) object is modified, is from the physical standpoint only subjective.
If now all these categories of the static rational order are only used as methodological presuppositions for the solution of specific scientific problems, and their ontological formulation is only a figure of speech meant to express nothing but the permanent form which a certain type of the rationalistic ideal preserves through all the variations of its content, then things, qualities, states, and relations simply supplement one another in the theoretic reconstruction of any particular fragment of reality. If, however, they are meant to express the universal objective order of reality as a whole, each one of them excludes the others and an ontology based on these categories is a set of contradictions.
Thus, we can isolate any single quality or any combination of qualities from the content of an object and treat it as one in many objects for the purposes and within the limits of a certain scientific problem without impairing the reality of these objects, because the concrete object has content enough for many qualitatively determined things and we cannot exhaust it in any theoretic system, however wide and complex the latter may be. But if we think of all the objects as being in themselves once and forever qualitatively determined things and of all the qualities that ever were and will be the ground of scientific analysis as objectively real, then the entire content of each thing will resolve itself into qualities and either isolated things or common qualities will be unreal, as is historically shown by the insoluble opposition of objective idealism and empiricism on this point.
Similarly, as long as we treat within a certain scientific investigation certain determinations of the object as changeless qualities, others as changing states, the changelessness of the former and the changeability of the latter are correlative and limited, qualities are bound to remain changeless and states are bound to change only with regard to each other
(256) and within the limits traced by the special problem of this investigation. But if we want all the determinations which ever have or will be treated as qualities to be qualities ontologically, there can be no states left; and if all those which have been or will be treated as states were states ontologically there would be no qualities. Either of these contradictory assumptions contradicts in turn the assumption of the reality of the things. The opposition between things and qualities has been formulated above; that between things and ontological states is equally clear. Suppose we have excluded qualities: then the thing will be analyzed into states, common to many things. The analysis is methodologically unobjectionable if reality is defined as the concrete historical reality, for no theoretic system can exhaust the total duration of a concrete object, and the latter will have always enough permanent existence left outside of the modifications which we have isolated as states. But if objects are rationally determinable things and if all their determinations which can ever be treated as states are states, the thing is completely decomposed into states, just as it was before decomposed into qualities.[3]
Both the ontological quality and the ontological state each separately excludes the other and excludes the thing. But they cannot exist without the thing; they have any significance at all only in so far as limiting the ontological absoluteness of the thing. A world of qualities is as impossible as a world of states. The knot of contradictions is already inextricable; and it becomes still more intricate when we introduce the ontological relation into reality in general. In the opposition between pluralism denying all
(257) objective realness of relations and monism rejecting all independent realness of things, qualities, and states, and melting them into one great whole of indefinitely complicated relations, the mutual exclusion of the relation and of the other ontological categories is historically manifest. If, indeed, a relation or group of relations is methodologically used to explain certain particular determinations of the concrete object, the object still preserves enough independence to be itself. But if, forgetting the limitation of all such explanations to a particular theoretic problem, we want to claim that all relations which have been or will be found objectively real and used to explain the empirical determinations of rational things, are ontologically real, then no state, no quality, and no thing can preserve its ontological reality. And since relations cannot exist by themselves, we reach an absolutely irrational mystical One, a Being which is identical with Non-Being.
The second type of the naturalistic ideal, that of a dynamic order of causally determined processes, is much simpler in its logical constitution. It implies, of course, a dynamization of things, properties, and relations, the first being conceived as empirical complexes of continuous processes, the second as general continuous processes more or less lasting, found in many complexes at once, the third as relations of functional dependence between elementary processes entering into different empirical complexes. By isolating causally related processes from empirical situations, theoretic rationalism makes causal relations independent of the specific organization imposed upon the situation by a system of schemes, and therefore absolute. Every process, elementary or complex, is thus taken to be a link of a causal series, necessarily determined by some other process, also elementary or complex, and itself in turn determining necessarily another elementary or complex process. There can be neither ä, beginning nor an end of the series, since the existence of the
(258) determination is not conditioned by anything. Space and time are only in so far necessary for the rational system of processes as this system tends to substitute itself for the system of things, and thus takes over such spatial and temporal problems as the latter involves. But by itself, the system of processes does not imply any definite conditions of extension and duration and therefore may be adequately expressed in terms of mathematical functions, substituting, of course, quantitative for qualitative determinations of particular processes and general types of processes. Anything in experience that is not a rationally determinable process, that appears either as a static thing, quality, state, relation, or as a concrete content or meaning, is in advance classed as subjective.
Here again the same distinction must be made as with regard to the application of the categorical order of things to reality. If the dynamic order of processes is used methodologically as a presupposition permitting the theoretic rationalization of any given natural becoming, it is perfectly justifiable, particularly since the static order of things does not permit us to attain the highest level of rationality in treating processes, even when it takes the latter into account as changes of states. It is thus a theoretically indispensable supplement of, often a substitute for, the methodological static order of things in treating special scientific problems. But when conceived ontologically as the ultimate and universal order of reality, it not only contradicts and excludes, by reducing it to subjectivity, the order of things, but also contradicts itself if we apply it to the total becoming of empirical reality in general. For causal explanation presupposes that the special form of the process which we want to explain already exists in experience. In the practical organization of reality it is determined in advance, and what we want to explain is only its appearance at a certain moment of the development of the concrete situation. In scientifi-
(259) -cally determined reality, in a perfect system of processes, it exists independently of duration and extension, and what we want to understand is only the causal relation between a process of this special form and other processes.
By implying the possibility of an indefinite repetition of a causal relation between processes of a certain type in space and time, the principle of causality implies an absolute existence, independent of space and time, of the types of these processes. And, clearly, the appearance of a new type of a process cannot be explained causally, for a new type of a process, like a new content, is an absolute addition to empirical reality, whereas the process as effect is equivalent in its reality to the process-cause, so much so that a branch of empirio-criticism has proposed to substitute the principle of equivalence for the principle of causality. The appearance of a new type in the effect would mean that the cause was not merely a process determining another process, but in some, however slight, measure a creative act. An agglomeration of processes, however long, could produce a new type, a new "essence," however insignificant, a new kind of qualitative change, for example, only if during every process a little reality appeared out of nothing, if in the effect there were a little more than in the cause—an assumption which contradicts the principle of causality.
The historical evolution of reality shows continually the appearance of new types of processes. Materialistic evolutionism itself must admit that the immense majority of the very processes found in the material world and now causally explained have appeared during evolution; most physical and chemical and all biological processes, according to its own doctrine, could not have existed in the original state of the material reality. But even putting materialistic metaphysics concerning the genesis of the pre-cultural world aside, at every moment we find new absolute beginnings of new forms of processes—in industry, in our own organic activities, in
(260) social life. Of course, materialistic evolutionism will not stop in its causal explanation when it finds a new form of a process started by conscious beings. It will search in the organism and back again in the inorganic material environment for the causes of the process. But this is ignoring the problem.
The whole point is not that a process of a definite formally ready kind appeared at a certain time and place, but that a type of processes which did not exist before appeared in practical experience. Once we have accepted creative activity as the source of practical situations within which processes are found, the problem is perfectly clear. A new modification is created by a new act, stabilized and objectivated in a repeatable situation, and once objectivated, becomes a content with a definite practical meaning—a new concrete object which, like all objects, grows in reality as part of concrete experience and may even be given and enter into practical systems as an object, without being reconstructed again by activity. This development can often be followed almost to its end in the automatization of bodily activities. It may be shortened by creating a process as a real object with the help of instruments, as when a movement, first consciously performed by man, becomes a part of the dynamic organization of a machine.
Now, all this evolution of new processes is incomprehensible on the ground of the ontological principle of causality. For the purpose of a particular scientific investigation, nomothetic science can help itself out by the assumption that a certain specific process which it is investigating is not really new in its essence, but is a combination of simpler processes, each of them old and known in its form. But this assumption has no validity when applied to the world in general. For as long as we deal with one or a few processes and are interested only in reducing these to old and known elementary causal series, we can ignore the fact that, when the process is thus analyzed into a combination of old processes,
(261) the novelty of its type is not explained but only changes its logical character, so that instead of a new type of process we have a new form of the combination of processes. But this fact cannot be ignored when we claim to treat in the same way the total becoming of reality.
Suppose that we have succeeded in analyzing all the processes of the world into combinations of a limited number of eternal, or rather untemporal, types of processes. First of all, we shall be forced then to put into the subjective, psychological field all the empirical side of these supposed combinations of processes, all the "appearance" of novelty and simplicity which these assumedly complex combinations of old processes present in experience. For instance, if we want to reduce all processes to combinations of movements, the empirical content of chemical changes, of changes of lights and colors, of sound, smell, and taste, etc., become "subjective. " And even then, the ontological problem still remains unsolved and causal evolutionism still contradicts itself; for there remains always to explain the new real foundations which correspond to these new subjective data, the appearance of new forms of combinations of the eternal elementary processes. The formula of the problem is changed, but the problem remains as insoluble as ever.
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ORDER
The order assumed by the naturalistic variation of the theoretic ideal is not only the oldest and the most firmly established in knowledge, but also its various aspects have been most thoroughly and consistently developed, and the specific tendency of theoretic systematization of reality, the tendency to neglect in so far as can be done the preexisting practical organization, has here found its most radical expression. In other branches of knowledge, the theoretic ideal is as yet less definite. There are still many problems to solve as to the form of this ideal in each group of sciences,
(262) and we hope that the attention of logic and methodology will be turned in the future rather to the elaboration of these other indispensable and practically most important but badly neglected forms of theoretic rationalization of reality than to the continual perfectioning of the naturalistic ideal. But as such a special elaboration is not within the scope of the present sketch, we shall limit ourselves to pointing out a few general questions concerning the presuppositions of each of these non-naturalistic orders and their relations to the naturalistic order and to one another.
The naturalistic order itself implies, as we have seen, the existence of "subjective" representations, images, data of consciousness, or whatever else we may call them; indeed, it can be maintained at all in application to empirical reality only under the condition that everything which does not comply with it is excluded from "material" reality and put among these immaterial psychological phenomena. In this way, a psychological domain is erected outside of the physical domain and grows in wealth with the growing rigorousness and simplicity of the material order, which forces us to treat more and more empirical data as subjective.
It is impossible to put clearly the problem of the theoretic rational order of the psychological domain without having first excluded two most important and in a measure contradictory errors which have been made, and are only too often still made in interpreting psychological reality. First of all, it cannot be sufficiently emphasized that the psychological domain is originally only a theoretically separated part of the empirical reality, a part which is indeed only negatively determined, since it includes everything which is left over from materialistic systematization, but which even in this purely negative original determination does not include all the empirical world outside of material nature, but only all reality outside of material nature. It does not therefore include active thought, which manifestly cannot
(263) belong to any order of reality whatever but possesses an entirely different order of its own, and has neither more nor less connection with physical reality than with psychological reality. Meanwhile, because psychological reality by opposition to physical nature is classed as "subjective," that is, as limited to the sphere of experience of an individual, and because the same individual to whom these "subjective," "psychological" determinations of reality are ascribed is also a source of activity, we find a relatively early identification of the "subject" as sphere and receptacle of psychological, physically unreal experiences, and the "subject" as source of activity. There were, of course, also other factors active in the history of this identification which we cannot follow here; but the identification once achieved, we have the peculiar problem of the subject-object dualism, which in the history of human thought belongs to the same class as the squaring of the circle or perpetuum mobile. On the one side there is the physical nature, self-existing and purely real; on the other side the subject, a receptacle of all experiences which are not nature, and a source of all activities.
But here the problem does not stop. On the objective side, together with nature, all other kinds of rational objective reality are put—the state, the system of theoretic ideas, religious trans-material realities, etc. — for each of them, just as material nature, leaves irrational remnants for which realism finds no other place than the subject. And on the side of the subject, since the latter is taken to be a source of activities and activities deal not only with experiences that do not conform with the objective order, but also and in the same line with such as do conform with it, such empirical data as are already included in the objective order become also put into the subjective sphere, together with experiences excluded from the objective order; and the subject becomes thus a receptacle for all experiences. And then an interesting antinomy begins. For, on the one hand, the totality of
(264) the objective orders includes the individual subjects themselves whose consciousnesses, connected with their bodies, appear as determined in all their parts by objective reality, and on the other hand the individual subjects include and determine by their consciousnesses the objective reality. Either of these two opposite standpoints can be developed philosophically with equal consistency, but neither can be reduced to the other, and their reconciliation is impossible.
If, indeed, philosophy accepts the affirmation that all objects are dependent on consciousness as included in it, then necessarily consciousness, as condition of everything else, becomes absolute. The world is then dissolved into mere data of consciousness, and the objects and objective orders must be reconstructed from these data and their subjective connections. All depends then, evidently, on the question how we conceive the data of consciousness and their connections. We may completely neglect the specific character of individual consciousness as it appears when opposed in theoretic reflection to the objective world, and simply treat as datum of consciousness everything just as it is given, with all its relatively subjective or relatively objective characteristics. We reach then the philosophy of "immanence." But the whole significance of the subjectivistic view is drawn from the specific character of the subjectively given objects and connections as against the objective world; if the subjective experiences and the objective world together, with all their specific characters, are equally immanent in consciousness, the concept of immanence loses all significance, becomes an empty qualification of all and everything. The theory of universal immanence cannot be overcome by any arguments, not because it is rationally perfect, but because it is rationally meaningless.
Suppose now we want to preserve all the specific char-
(265) -acters of subjectivity as individual subjectivity, we evidently cannot deduce the objective world as it is given to the individual along with and opposed to his consciousness, from this very consciousness. We can only deny this objective world and treat it as a mere appearance, as an illusion of the individual subject. This is pure solipsism, which is as invincible rationally as the philosophy of universal immanence, though for different reasons: it simply refuses to accept any premises which would make a discussion possible, since any discussion whatever demands the recognition of some ground transcending individual consciousness.
Much more productive philosophically was the middle way of objective idealism, in which the effort was made to deduce the objective world from consciousness by conceiving consciousness as bearing in itself sufficient foundations of objectivity without ceasing to be the subject, though no longer the individual subject. In this class we find the Fichtean absolute Ego and the Kantian transcendental unity of apperception, the concept of a social consciousness as sum or as resultant of individual consciousnesses, and finally the phenomenalistic doctrine of a world of data from which the principle of consciousness is excluded but which has the same formal character as the succession of data in individual experience viewed in the act of self-reflection, only without the limitation in extension of individual experience.
But in spite of the undoubted importance which this method had in provoking philosophical productivity, it shares the weakness of all half-solutions. Whereas at first glance it seems to unify the opposite viewpoints, on closer investigation it proves to have simply divided the difficulties which separate them and thus made the opposition less conspicuous. As far, indeed, as the super-individual consciousness transcends the individual either by its absolute rationality, as in the Kantian and Fichtean idealism, or by its extension, as in the sociological and phenomenalistic conception of the individual must take toward it the same attitude as toward the objective world, and we have the same antinomy as before,
(266) only with a more limited application. And on the other hand, in so far as the super-individual consciousness preserves some subjectivity, our reflection about it must conceive it in the same way as it conceives the individual subject, as dependent on the same objective world which we try to deduce from it, but transcending it either by the incalculable richness of its content—in transcendental or absolute idealism —or by the perfection of its form—in theories which try to reduce rational objectivity to social objectivity or logical order to associative order. And the antinomy repeats itself once more.
If, on the contrary, philosophy in developing its systems tries to remain on purely objective ground, then consistently it is the objective world which becomes an Absolute. And the development of problematization becomes almost exactly parallel to that which we see in subjectivism. The pantheistic inclusion of the individual subject with all its characteristics in an absolute objective unity is a perfect counterpart of the doctrine of immanence and leaves, like the latter, the real problem completely untouched. More important historically than (on the subjective side) solipsism, though not less one-sided, is the essential tendency of post-Socratic philosophy to exclude in some way the fact that the character and order of all elements constituting the objective world vary when these elements are given in the individual process of experience, and vary even from individual to individual and from moment to moment. This tendency leads to a division of the entire world into a positive side, representing the objective absolute order, and a negative side, representing a mere disturbance of this order by the individual subject; this negative side is treated then as unworthy or incapable of being investigated, precisely because it is supposed to involve no positive order, all positive order belonging by definition to the objective world. A modern expression of the same tendency is found in radical materialism and its
(267) treatment of consciousness as "epiphenomenon," only this doctrine is incomparably narrower than the ancient doctrines were, because in the materialistic conception the objective world itself has been deprived of most of its content.
The deduction of the subject from the object brings with it again the original antinomy, though in a somewhat different form. The subject, being entirely the product of the objective world, is by the very essence a "subject for the object," that is, can and must be only a perfectly adequate subjective counterpart of the objective reality; otherwise we should necessarily come to the conclusion that the objective reality, being experienced by an inadequate subject, is in fact a subjective world. Meanwhile, the subject supposed produced by the objective world is precisely the individual, limited, and imperfect subject, distorting the objective reality in the process of his experience. This was, for example, the paradox of the doctrine of divine creation: God created men to understand and glorify him and to be happy, and men were essentially incapable of understanding him, with the rare exception of a few saints unwilling to glorify him, and mostly condemned to wretchedness. Quite analogous is the paradox of modern evolutionism: individual consciousness has developed exclusively as instrument of adaptation to objective reality, and it is quite unadapted to objective reality, leading all the time human beings, with the rare exception of a few modern scientists, to various absurd notions about reality and to a very irrational behavior. And if we try to avoid the paradox by putting some intermediary link between the individual and the objective world, a rôle which in the doctrine of creation was played by the religious system connecting man with God and in the doctrine of natural evolution by the scientific systems through which the individual can understand the world and adapt himself to it, then our paradox repeats itself twice on a smaller scale, since the individual is not perfectly adapted to the system of religion or science and the
(268) system of religion or science is not perfectly adapted to its supernatural or natural object.
Finally, it is evident that, once we have opposed subject and object to each other as ultimate principles of the empirical world, any common principle to which we want to reduce them must both transcend experience, since we treat the process of experience as essentially subjective, and be irrational, since rationality belongs according to our premises essentially to the objective side of the world. We reach thus such conceptions as the "One" of Plotinus, the "Will" of Schopenhauer, the "Life" of Bergson, essences whose cognition demands some mysterious act of ecstasy, direct apprehension, or intuition, in which subject and object become unified, while the real problem is left as it was. For not only can we not understand how subject and object evolve out of this mystical essence, but when they are already there, the old antinomy reappears, since their common trans-empirical and irrational ground does not change anything at all in their reciprocal relations within the given world. The most consistent is the solution of Hegel, who simply accepted both the traditional opposition of subject and object and the necessity of having them reunited, and postulated this reunion as a continuous alternative passage from one to another; but such a solution of the problem is evidently only a formulation of its insolubility.
The conception of the subject as opposed to the objective world can have thus no ontological significance, though it is perfectly justified methodologically. In other words, there are no phenomena essentially belonging to the subjective domain as against others essentially belonging to the objective domain, but when studying any fragment whatever of the concrete world as possessing a certain order we can always make a separation between certain sides of objects or thoughts, which from the standpoint of this order are treated as objective, existing or subsisting in accordance with the
(269) given order, whereas other sides of the same concrete objects of thoughts may be qualified as subjective relatively to the first and from the same standpoint.
There may be therefore as many different ways of separating empirical phenomena into subjective and objective as there are possible theoretic orders of the objective world; the psychological subject which we obtain by excluding from real objects and connections everything which does not fit into the physical order, is only one of these methodological conceptions and has nothing in common with any conception that might be formed on the ground of a theory of thought by excluding from the domain of objective thought all acts which do not fit into a certain logical order.
And if instead of starting with the physical order of reality we assumed, for instance, the social order of reality as fundamental, our conception of the subject would be also that of a subject of experience, not of a subject of thoughts, but it would be entirely different from the one which has historically developed. This historical development was almost entirely due to the fact that human knowledge started with material nature and reached the highest degree of perfection in studying material nature, so that the psychological domain, originally defined by opposition to the physical order, has remained fundamentally the domain of personal experiences as opposed to natural reality; the one special conception of the methodological subject which has been formed from the naturalistic standpoint has absorbed, so to speak, all other possible conceptions of a subject of experiences, though not perhaps those of a subject of thoughts.
Of course, the psychological domain as long as only negatively determined by opposition to the natural world has neither definite limits, since it is simply all reality that is nut physical, nor a definite form, since it is simply defined as not possessing the physical form. But the theoretic ideal of perfect rationality of the world compels us to give an internal
(270) limitation and a rational form to this remnant of the physical reality, which is in fact much wider and richer than the physical reality itself, and that is what we do in psychological theory.
It is precisely in psychological theory, in the attempts to introduce scientifically a rational order into the psychological domain as a special domain of reality, that we meet the second fundamental error concerning the character of this domain. This error consists in applying to psychological phenomena principles created in constructing the order of material nature, and in trying to incorporate the totality of these phenomena into that very nature from which they have been excluded, so as to attain a monistic view of reality. As we have seen, the only justification of the assumption that there is a duality of psychological "representations," "perceptions," "remembrances, " "associations," etc., on the one hand and material nature on the other hand is precisely the impossibility of including the whole concrete empirical reality in the physical order, the necessity of cutting off a part of it; the psychological phenomena are not excluded because they are distinct by their essence from the rest, but they are treated as distinct by their essence because they are excluded from the physical order. Being a receptacle of all that seems irrational from the standpoint of the naturalistic principles, the psychological field evidently cannot be rationalized with the help of these very principles. This is so clear that even the most radical naturalism never tried to apply its rationalistic presuppositions to psychological phenomena taken directly as individual experiences. But it failed and still fails to notice the contradiction when it goes at this problem indirectly, by substituting for each psychological phenomenon something to which formally one of the categories used with reference to the material world could be applied; and it does not see that in this case either the irrationality seemingly removed from each psychological phenomenon in particular will continue
(271) to exist in the connection between these phenomena, or if these connections become rationalized, the system of reality thus obtained does not correspond any longer to the psychological domain, but to something entirely different. This is precisely what happens when psychology, instead of taking as object-matter the psychological phenomenon itself, the "subjective datum," that is, that which is given to the individual, that object or connection which the individual experiences but which cannot be incorporated into the natural order, begins to study the fact of the appearance of this datum in individual consciousness. It substitutes then for a certain experience as the individual himself perceives it, the occurrence of a certain experiencing as the theorist who observes this individual reconstructs it.
This occurrence, this "psychological fact," is then categorized either as a state or as a process. The difference between these two categories, which at first seems to be, as in the material world, only a difference between a static and a dynamic view of the psychological reality, has here still other logical consequences. For a state is essentially the state of something and therefore the use of this category implies the assumption of a psychological consciousness which, even if it is not defined as a "soul," as a substance of which those states are the modi, even if it is supposed entirely exhausted in its reality by its states and existing only in them, is nevertheless a basis of unity of all its states, is at least a common field, an empty receptacle for all of them. On the ground of this concept, all the facts of experiencing which the observer finds "in" the given individual belong together as states of this individual's consciousness, and only this consciousness as a whole belongs to the objective world. But the consciousness as a whole is evidently an absolutely irrational chaos, since it is merely a projection of the total individual sphere of experience and reflection upon the screen of naturalistic categories, without
(272) even that order which the individual at least partially constructs within his sphere; for this order as realized by the individual within the empirical chaos of his experience appears indeed as existing and objectively real to the experiencing and acting individual himself, who knows nature only from his experience and reflection and for whom there is no other objectivity than the one he produces or reproduces, but it does not exist from the standpoint of the psychologist who observes this individual's experiencing and for whom this individual's reflection is not an objectively valid activity constructing or reconstructing an objective rational order, but merely a plurality of psychological states. The irrationality remains, of course, exactly the same if instead of states of consciousness we interpret facts of experiencing as states of the individual organism.
The concept of the psychological process can, indeed, escape this difficulty, for the process is a self-sufficient ontological category and does not have to be made dependent on the existence of a common entity—a soul or consciousness. But here another and in a sense an opposite difficulty presents itself. For if conscious processes as processes of experience do not belong together as mere modifications of one consciousness or one body, they must belong together on some other ground. Otherwise there would be no reason and no possibility for a science of the psychological reality as distinct from the rest of reality. A process of experiencing would have a significance only in connection with the experienced object; the introduction of this concept would correspond not to a distinction between "objective" and "subjective" phenomena, but merely to the fact that, besides the individual's having certain phenomena given to him, somebody else (or this individual himself when retrospectively reflecting about it) is aware, as social observer, of these phenomena being given to this individual, and is aware of it as of an occurrence happening in connection with some other occurrences
(273) within that part of empirical reality which is given to him, the observer. In order to give these processes the significance of elements of a specific psychological reality, it is indispensable that one conceive them both as interconnected and as at the same time distinct from other processes.
But this is clearly impossible. For the only way in which they can be interconnected is by being referred to, dynamically centralized around, the same individual. Such a centralization of real processes implies that the individual must be a real object to which processes converge from other objects and from which they emanate to other objects. He cannot be a consciousness, for then these processes would become states of consciousness; he can be only a body. But what processes can there be centralized as psychological around the body? Evidently not the processes going on in the material environment of the body, since these are already classed as natural processes. Can they be the organic processes ? The naturalistic schools which first tried to reduce psychological phenomena to processes of organic adaptation accepted this idea. But the organic processes are not what we mean when we think of the processes of experiencing. On the contrary, when the facts of experiencing are conceived as states of consciousness, the psychologist takes into account the organic processes of biological adaptation as going on alongside states of consciousness and always accompanying them; this is the well-known psycho-physiological parallelism. Unless then the processes of experiencing are kept as "epiphenomena," which means simply a recognition of their irrationality and a denial of any real or ideal connection between them and the material natural order, they have simply disappeared as a consequence of the attempt to rationalize them, without leaving anything instead as object-matter. And besides, if we should interpret experiencing as a biological adaptation between the individual organism and his environment, it is quite illogical to conceive it as a
(274) process. There are no processes going on between the organism and the environment; there are only relations between organic processes and processes going on in the environment. The organism from the standpoint of the dynamic natural order is a set of continuous processes; a phenomenon of, biological adaptation is the causal determination of an organic process by an extra-organic process or vice versa. A certain science is, of course, free to study such relations between organic and extra-organic processes instead of studying psychological phenomena, that is, experiences as given to the experiencing individual. But such a science is not psychology; it is a part of biology. The behavioristic school does good work in studying organic behavior instead of conscious data; but this does not mean that it reduces psychology to a study of behavior, but that it has left the field of psychology to other schools and gone over into the biological field.[4]
The exclusion of certain phenomena as psychological from the domain of material nature was, as we have seen, due to the implicit assumption of the naturalistic method that reality is constituted by objects and connections uniformly determined in accordance with the same perfect rational order and that therefore we can study them while ignoring the variety of actively constructed situations in which they become determined. It is consequently evident that, if we meet phenomena which do not fit into the natural order, it is either because these phenomena are not rationally determined at all, or because their rational determination differs from that
(275) which is assumed as common to all objects or connections of the naturalistic type and requires therefore the reconstruction of the situation for its adequate understanding. The conception that any phenomena are not rationally determined at all is opposed to the rationalistic ideal of every science; therefore a science which wants to study those phenomena which naturalism rejects must decide for the second part of the alternative and consider these phenomena as fully apt to be theoretically rationalized under the condition of having the situations to which they belong theoretically reconstructed. Such a science will then put upon situations the same claim of perfect rationality which naturalistic science puts upon objects, ignoring again that most of the situations are rationally imperfect and that those which approach perfection owe this to the organizing schematic activity.
In fact, every particular psychological problem which we state, not in terms of states or processes but in terms of individual experiences, is a problem of situations instead of being a problem of objects. What we ask ourselves when we investigate individual experience, not as integral part of the natural world but as divergent from the natural world, specifically personal, belonging to the actual sphere of this particular individual, is not "What is this reality?" but "How does this individual at this moment experience this reality and why does he experience it as he does?" This implies the well-known empirical statement that a certain reality can be experienced differently at different moments and by different individuals. But we cannot accept for scientific purposes the whole enormous complexity of the concrete, non-rationalized empirical world, which would force us to admit first that there is not a single individual experience identical to another and that the explanation of the individual's actually experiencing a certain reality in a certain way must be sought in the total sphere of this individual's experience, past and present. If we want to rationalize
(276) personal experiences theoretically, we must search first for some objective similarities between some of these experiences at least, which would permit us to generalize them in some measure, to ignore their variations within certain objectively determinable limits, and yet to take enough of these variations into account to justify the distinction between the uniformly determined natural reality and its personal aspects. We must have, secondly, more or less rational and objectively determinable, limited sections of personal experience to which we could refer particular experiences of an individual and thus explain the particular aspects which a certain reality assumes for this individual at this particular moment without being forced to take his entire concrete personality into consideration.
The situation—which may not be perfectly in harmony with the demands of the natural order, but which nevertheless is in some degree rational—gives us both a ground for the generalization and a ground for the explanation of personal experiences. A reality is supposed to assume similar aspects in similar situations, and if it has a certain aspect for the given individual at the given moment, it is because it is determined for his actual experience by some actual situation of which it is a part. Therefore whenever similar situations are found, we expect similar experiences of given reality, and, on the contrary, in different situations we expect different aspects of this reality to appear. Vice versa, whenever we find similar experiences of a reality, we assume the existence of similar situations, whereas different experiences of the same reality point to the existence of different situations. The objective natural reality—thing, property, relation, process—viewed from the psychological standpoint, does not bear in its self-identity a sufficient or even a necessary condition of being always and by everybody experienced in the same way; nor is an objective difference of natural realities sufficient to guarantee a general and permanent
(277) difference of their representations. To make the first experienced in a similar way and the second in a different way, we must have them included in similar situations; in the contrary case the self-identity of the first may result in a nonidentity of representations, and the very difference of the second may lead to an identity of their aspects.
To heighten the rationality of its order, psychology implicitly or explicitly assumes that in a certain measure similar situations and similar experiences are perfectly identical, and in repeated laboratory experiments tries to approach this identity as far as empirically possible by artificially and systematically isolating a certain situation from concrete experience, and at the same time varies situations in definite ways so as to obtain a more exact definition of the corresponding variations of experiences. Wherever it cannot create identical and stable situations experimentally, it constructs them by abstraction, implicitly ignoring or explicitly excluding such personal variations as can have no scientific significance at the given stage of psychological systematization. It constructs thus analytically, as a theory of psychological elements, classes of experiences corresponding to definite realities and reconstructs out of these elements synthetically, as a theory of psychological complexes, classes of situations which by their specific forms are supposed to determine the ways in which certain groups of realities are experienced. Of course all this work is no longer a reconstruction of the original practical situations, but of situations qualified as psychological by the assumption of an existing natural reality to which all experiences are supposed to refer.
But besides this static order of psychology there is a dynamic psychological order possible, leading, just as does the dynamic order of nature, to a determination of causal laws. In the dynamic order of nature the original elements are modifications of objects as against the static natural order of which the original elements are the objects themselves.
(278)
A parallel difference can be found between the static and the dynamic orders in psychology. The former bears upon the data of individual experience as distinct from natural things; its original materials, the concrete object-matter upon which it draws, are contents of objects. The static order ignores the meaning as such; if it has to take into account the difference between the natural relation of a thing to other things and the connection which the individual establishes between this thing as object of his experience and other objects, it either treats this connection as a relation which the thing acquires in the personal situation in which it is given, or if this cannot be done, it turns the meaning into a content and treats it as an aspect of the thing in personal experience. The first happens, for instance, when we distinguish the order of "apperception" of objects in personal experience from their natural order; the second, when we treat the emotional meaning which objects acquire by their connection with a whole personal organization of life as an emotional content attached to these objects by the individual.
The psychological experience as such when statically rationalized can have no meaning, for it is inclosed and already determined within a situation. But without meaning there can be no dynamic order of personal experience, for only in so far as an object has a meaning for the individual can it have an active influence upon other objects of his experience. A psychological datum does not lead to any modifications of other data. And it is impossible that natural reality should influence psychological becoming; physical objects cannot be the causes of psychological effects, since they are objective standards with which psychological experiences do or do not comply, depending on personal situations. A physical object could influence dynamically psychological objects only if, by becoming itself a psychological object, it brought a meaning with it into the psychological domain; but physical objects have no meanings. In order therefore
(279) to have a rational order of psychological becoming, we must have somewhere objects which are at the same time determined rationally by situations—for only then they can be psychologically rational data-and are nevertheless dynamic concrete historical objects with meanings.
Now, such objects can be only social. The social object is determined as element of situations, but of many situations constructed and reconstructed again and again in the experience of many individuals; in so far as determined within each situation, it is a thing; in so far as varying in fact from individual to individual and still the same, it is a historical object and the fact of its actually being connected all the time with various other objects gives it a meaning; it opens possibilities and suggestions of acts which neither the psychological datum nor the natural things can do. We shall return to this question. The fact is that objects can have meanings for psychologically conceived individuals, can suggest changes of psychological phenomena as such only if they are social; only the social reality which, though objectively determined, is still dynamic, can exercise an influence upon psychological reality. A dynamic psychology, searching for laws of psychological becoming, must be a social psychology.
The psychological problem is here no longer started by the divergence of content between individual experience and the objectively fixed material nature, but by the divergence between the meaning which an object has in the experience of one individual and that which it possesses for other individuals. Of course, the implicit or explicit assumption is that the object has for the individual the meaning it has, because the individual connects it with certain other objects and determines it with reference to them as an element of a definite situation. Therefore the difference or similarity of the influence which it has upon the personal experience of various members of the group depends upon the difference
(280) or similarity of the situations into which they introduce it, which they accept as the ground of its determination. Individual acceptance or non-acceptance of a certain situation with its consequences as to the determination of objects is psychologically not to be explained, for it would demand a complete reconstruction of individual past; we simply find the situation accepted, and this is a fundamental psychological fact. From the standpoint of this acceptance, the fact of having a certain meaning given to an object, a meaning conditioned by the situation into which the object is being introduced, becomes itself a psychological occurrence, a personal attitude taken toward this object.
The attitude toward the object, being dependent upon the constructed and accepted situation, a modification of the situation by the introduction of some new object or group of objects will change the attitude and produce a new attitude instead. Assuming now classes of identically defined situations common to a given social group and socially common objects, social values determined by these situations, we can always say what objects have to be brought to (or excluded from) a given situation as accepted by the individual in order to produce another definite situation; we can say what social values have to be used to influence the individual at the time in order to change a given attitude into another definite attitude. On the ground of the general tendency of the rationalistic ideal which consists in searching in the given field of reality for the order which we find in the most perfect instances of systematic organization, we shall presuppose, as a methodological principle, that all attitudes are conditioned by perfect situations and every situation belongs to a socially uniform and once and forever determinable class, so that the appearance of every attitude can be explained on the ground of some pre-existing attitude by the influence of some social value (or group of social values) which have changed the old into the new situation. Thus, we have the
(281) formal basis for laws of psychological becoming whose general formula is not, as in natural causality, constituted by two elements, a process determined in its appearance by another process, but of three members, an attitude determined in its appearance by a pre-existing attitude and a social value.[5]
On the ground of these laws, the psychological evolution of an individual or of a race may be reconstructed as a dynamic synthesis of situations taken in the course of their construction, though, of course, psychological laws, just as physical laws, can account only for the appearance in a certain sphere of psychological reality of attitudes and social values which have already existed in experience, not for the creation of new ones, which have to be treated as mere accidental results of combinations of the old or as approximate repetitions of the old. Psychology cannot reconstruct the concrete development of psychological experience in general any more than natural science can explain the concrete development of natural reality in general.
And psychology, which must presuppose for the purposes of its theoretic systematization a perfect uniformity of analogous situations from moment to moment and from individual to individual, must also ignore, as we have seen, cases in which the order which it presupposes does not exist. It must be therefore supplemented by some other science, just as it has itself supplemented the sciences of material nature. Its own partial success in rationalizing phenomena which natural science could not rationalize has proved due to the fact that it took objects within the situations in which they are determined and which the physical order ignores. Since all order of objects is due to situations, psychology can go
(282) back to the practical origin of the natural order in individual experience and explain thus why in certain cases individual experience harmonizes with the scientifically postulated order of natural things or processes, whereas in other cases it does not. Though from the naturalistic standpoint explanation seems needed only in cases of disagreement between individual experience and the natural order, yet this explanation would be impossible except on a ground which permits us to explain also cases of agreement. In the same way, if we want to supplement psychology in cases which it cannot handle because they lack the required order, we must have a standpoint which would permit us also to understand the origin of cases which it does handle because they do present the expected order. But no science of reality can understand the absolute origin of any rational order from a complete or partial empirical chaos, since every science of reality must presuppose the order which it postulates ready and existing in its most perfect form. Only a theory of activity can explain the gradual genesis of any type of order from concrete historical reality. On the ground of the sciences of reality, to explain the origin of an order can only mean to explain the rational organization of the systems in which this order is manifested as a result of their determination by some wider and more comprehensive system of which they are a part.
This shows that it would be a fundamental error to try to supplement rational psychology with its implicit or explicit postulates of a certain perfect order by some more vague and more subtle kind of psychological investigation which would reject all presuppositions of perfect uniformity of psychological data, attitudes, and situations, and try to describe as exactly as possible individual phenomena in their original variety. Such a descriptive psychology, provided it did not, as frequently happens in such circumstances, introduce unconsciously postulates as far-reaching as those
(283) on which psychological generalizations are now based, could be only either literature or a mere preparation of materials, which scientific psychology would then use according to its own methodological presuppositions.
THE SOCIOLOGICAL ORDER
The only way in which problems left aside by psychology can be made the object-matter of another science is by taking into account the dependence of situations on schemes. All uniformity of situations being the product of their schematic determination, the empirical existence or non-existence of that regularity of individual experiences and attitudes which psychology must postulate can be rationally explained instead of being simply accepted as given only if we interpret each particular case as a result of the empirical realization of schemes. Of course, in order to make our explanation rational for cases in which the required order is not present, we must make use of the supposition that different schemes when simultaneously realized in a certain section of experience interfere with each other. This supposition is parallel to that of physical science which assumes that, when certain causal series are simultaneously developing in a certain section of experience, they interfere with each other and none of the respective causal laws are directly manifested in experience. The difference between the applications of the principle of interference to reality when treated as natural and selfdetermined, and to reality when taken as consciously human and determined actively by practical schemes, consists in the fact that a natural law when interfered with by another law is supposed to be fully realized nevertheless, but in combination with the interfering law, whereas if two schemes interfere with each other, this means that neither of them is actually realized except in so far as the interfering one permits. However, in spite of this difference, the principle of interference permits us to assume that all individual
(284) situations are perfectly determined by schemes, though in particular cases a situation may be subjected to the common determination. of several schemes and thus present an accidental mixture of incomplete organizations, each of which would conform perfectly with the schematic type if it could be completed and were not stopped on the way by the interference of the others.
Since psychology has already put situations on the ground of particularized personal experience as opposed to the general natural world instead of taking them as they originally are, that is, within the concrete empirical world of historical reality, this new rational order of schemes by which the psychological order of situations must be supplemented becomes defined theoretically with reference and in opposition to particularized personal experience, and it is not a direct reconstruction of practical schemes as superimposed upon the historical becoming of the total of concrete experience. In other terms, this new extra-psychological reality is as relative to the psychological reality as the latter is to physical reality. It is the specific reality which is common to psychologically differentiated and isolated individuals—common not because composed of self-existing trans-psychological things or processes, but because determined by super-individual schemes. In a word, it is the social reality.[6]
It seems hardly necessary to develop here at great length the arguments showing the necessary independence of the
(285) social order from both the psychological and the physical orders. The very fact that there are schemes in empirical life guarantees a specific object-matter to social theory in so far as the latter is the only science of reality which does deal with practical schemes determining practical situations uniformly for various individuals and at various moments. And it is clear that a science which reconstructs reality as a rational order of schemes cannot be identified with or subordinated to a science which reconstructs it as a rational order of situations or of things.
Furthermore, since a social order, super-individual and yet working within individually diversified and psychologically isolated spheres of personal experience, must be admitted, precisely so as to allow us to understand phenomena for which personal experience in its psychological limitation offers no sufficient ground of explanation, it is self-contradictory to reduce the social to the psychological and vice versa. We can indeed abstractly conceive society as a synthesis of psychological individuals just as we can conceive the psychological individual as synthesis of social schemes—laws, customs, mores, religious, intellectual and aesthetic beliefs, economic institutions, technical traditions, etc. But in either case we lose from sight the very condition without which neither particular psychological nor particular social phenomena can be the object-matter of science: the existence of both a specifically social and a specifically psychological order. By conceiving society as a synthesis of psychological individuals we preclude the possibility of a rational solution of all particular problems which can be solved only with the help of common social schemes acting in and through individuals and yet existing independently of each of them. By conceiving the individual as synthesis of social schemes, we preclude the possibility of the solution of all those problems in which the continuity of personal life or the uniformity of experiences in all conscious individuals independent of the
(286) social groups to which they belong are the necessary presuppositions.
Finally, it is perfectly clear that we cannot divide or classify empirical phenomena into such as are by their ontological essence psychological and such as are essentially ontologically social, since every phenomenon can be treated from either of the two standpoints. In general the problem of the relation between the psychological and the social, if put on the ground of an absolute ontological distinction between these two domains, is as insoluble as the problem of the ontological relation between the natural reality as the "object" and the psychological "subject," and leads to similar contradictions. But as a methodological distinction of two different rational orders, with no limits of application traced a priori, but each used whenever in a particular case it helps better than the other to attain the rationalistic ideal of science, the separation of the psychological and the social is as indispensable as that of the physical and of the psychological.
In this field, however, the battle has been fought and won by the very progress of positive sociological investigations. More dangerous seems to be the position of the sociological method when it meets the traditional self-assertion of naturalism. Indeed, when viewed from the standpoint of the psychologically isolated personality, the social seems to share with the natural its super-individual, trans-psychological character. Thence the easy temptation to reduce it to the natural by assuming that whatever in the individual's psychology transcends the limits of personal experience or individually developed behavior has its source either in the biological continuity of the race or in the natural environment, and that the super-individual social order is thus reducible to the co-operation of common racial features and geographical influences.
If we omit here the metaphysical problem of inherited active tendencies, which belongs in the philosophy of activity,
(287) and limit ourselves to the empirical aspect of the question as concerning the order of social reality, the error of these naturalistic claims is perfectly evident. The objectivity of biological or geographical phenomena is an objectivity of things and processes; the objectivity of social phenomena is an objectivity of rules. The former, that is, the individual's own organism and its natural environment, are supra-personal as given materials and instruments of personal activity which he can use efficiently for his aims only by taking into account their pre-existing real characters. The latter, social institutions of all kinds, are supra-personal because they impose a definite form upon personal activity and compel the individual to choose definite aims and to select definite materials and instruments for their realization.
Therefore there is and can be no correspondence whatever between the biological or geographical order or their combination on the one hand and the social order on the other. The same race in the same geographic conditions develops the most heterogeneous forms of social organization at different periods of its historical existence; different races in different or in similar geographic environments show both similar and different institutions without any regularity whatever. Of course, the question of the nature of the materials and instruments given to activity may and usually does condition the selection of those schemes from among the given ones which permit the group to organize activity most efficiently for the accepted purposes and under the given conditions, and such relatively most efficient schemes are apt to be perpetuated and developed; but the character of the social schemes from among which the selection is made is no more determined by natural conditions than is the artistic style of a painting determined by its object-matter. And even independently of those self-evident philosophical considerations, frond the standpoint of a purely empirical scientific method a sociology which, on the ground of a few approximate parallelisms
(288) between certain natural conditions and certain social forms, speaks of the natural, that is causal, determination of social organization by biological or geographical factors, leaving aside all the "exceptions," which are incomparably more numerous than these facts which seem to corroborate the supposition and are entirely inexplicable on the naturalistic basis—such a sociology has certainly not gone beyond the stage of the "philosophy of history" of the eighteenth century.
But on the other hand, the more recent attempts to deduce the natural from the social order as one of the "oldest social traditions" (expression of Le Roy) are also unjustified. For, although the foundation of the natural order is laid by situations which reach their rationally perfect form only when determined by schemes, yet these situations themselves could not constitute a natural order without the generalizing abstracting activity of theoretic thought. Furthermore, even in the practical organization of reality, perfect situations and permanent empirical systems of perfect situations, such as the natural order of reality presupposes as its empirical basis, can be attained only if the schemes themselves are systematized by practical dogmas, whereas the social order as such does not imply any more comprehensive organization than the scheme. Finally, the most important argument against this sociological standpoint is that the social order itself is not a primary order of reality, but is a theoretic superstructure raised upon an imperfect and fragmentary type of practical organization, and a superstructure which could have no separate existence in its typical form except in so far as supplementary and opposed to the psychological order which, as we know, is not primary either. The practical schemes by which situations are determined assume a specifically social character only by contrast with the specifically personal psychological situations. Originally situations are not personal and schemes are not social; concrete objects and connections of the historical reality and practical systems
(289) of reality may be either limited to the spheres of experience and reflection of one individual, or extending to all the individuals of a group, or even covering the common domain of experience and reflection of many different social groups between which there is no social bond whatever. The distinctions between social and psychological, psychological and physical, are distinctions between correlative orders within the same empirical real world, each independent of the other though all together dependent, first on the concrete historical reality, secondly on practical activity which organizes and rationalizes it in part, and thirdly on theoretic thought which pushes this rationalization as far toward unity as it can go.
Of course, in numerous particular cases it may be possible to show how a certain systematic organization of physical reality has grown up within the experience of a social group under the influence of a socially recognized scheme which has been determining for many centuries individual practice and individual theory. Such special sociological investigations, up to the present pursued only occasionally and almost limited to the French sociological school, should certainly become more frequent, not only for theoretic, but also for practical social purposes, for they contribute much toward strengthening the faith in the power of social culture and toward undermining naturalistic fetishism. But the possibility of such sociological studies does not prove the social origin of the natural order as such, any more than the demonstration of the fact that the presence or absence of certain natural materials has contributed to the growth or decay of certain social institutions proves that the social order has its source in the natural order.
The rational character of the social order has been as yet only imperfectly determined by sociological investigations and methodological studies, precisely because of the continual extension to their field of either psychological or naturalistic
(290) views. We can therefore only outline those presuppositions which are logically indispensable for the constitution of a social science as supplementary and distinct from other branches of knowledge. The fundamental presupposition is, as we have seen, that social reality is formally constituted by schemes, by social rules, formulated or not, giving uniform and permanent definitions of personal situations. But these social rules as opposed to psychological experiences and attitudes are no longer conceived as concrete dynamic tendencies, as they originally are from the practical standpoint, but as static practical principles imposed upon the individual. Their active, dynamic character, by which they actually determine in each particular case the reconstruction of the schematic situation with the help of auxiliary situations, has been separated here from their formal, static, generally standardizing character, because the actual reconstruction of the schematic situation is now a psychological, personal matter, whereas the general standard which this reconstruction must follow is social, supra-personal. When the social rule is reflectively objectivated and formulated in words, or when a set of rules connected in any institution becomes attached to a common social symbol, the rule or the institution acquires for the individual who takes an attitude toward it the character of a specific social value superadded to its original character of a scheme.
Social values constitute the matter of social reality of which the schemes are the form. They are a specific product of the social order, intermediary between the concrete empirical objects composing historical reality and the things of natural reality. The scheme, by determining socially personal situations, determines also, of course, the objects included in these situations in a way which is formally general and stable and in so far similar to the determination of things; the social object is thus clearly distinguished from the concrete historical object which lacks one general and stable
(291) determination, but has many particular and changing determinations. But at the same time this determination, as social and opposed to the psychological variety of personal experiences, appears as a standard imposed upon individual experiencing of this object rather than as an absolutely real form inherent in the object itself; and a standard may be complied with or not. We cannot therefore exclude from the object as socially determined, as part of the general theoretically rationalized social reality, the variations of individual experiences which disagree with its social determination in the way we do with some particular variations in constructing particular practical situations and with all disagreeing variations in constructing the theoretic order of physical reality. These variations belong in some measure to the social object, not indeed as integral components of its content and meaning, as they do in concrete historical experience, but as psychological influences which affect the efficiency of its social determination, make the latter appear more or less valid individually; the social requirement that the object be commonly and permanently defined in a certain manner may be more or less realized in fact. And thus, if such divergent variations increase, the social determination of the object may be judged as no longer in conformity with the way in which the object commonly and actually appears to individual members of the group, and the object may receive a new determination. By this possibility of having its general and stable determination changed to another, equally general and stable but different, the social object is most clearly distinguished from the physical thing whose determination is supposed purely objective and unaffected by a change of personal experiences. Therefore, if we are forced to change the determination of a physical thing, we characterize this change as a discovery of the real nature of the thing and by opposition to this real nature qualify the preceding, rejected determination as a merely social product.
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The second fundamental theoretic presupposition about social reality is that, since the influence of social rules upon psychologically isolated individuals is logically possible only under the assumption of social communication between them, a social rule extends only as far as the necessary social communication reaches, that is, mostly over social groups limited in extension and duration. Here again the rule, theoretically qualified as social, distinguished itself from the original practical scheme as realizing itself in concrete historical reality. Since in the latter individual spheres of experience and reflection are not isolated from each other and since social communication, as we have seen in a former chapter, is not the condition of the community of experiences but, on the contrary, is conditioned by it, a practical organization of reality can pass from individual to individual without any need of conscious social influence and a scheme has originally no limits of application. Furthermore, since the social values are such in so far as determined by schemes, their extension and duration, unlike the extension and duration of concrete historical objects, become equally limited to a certain social group.
Social reality is thus divided into sections, each section formed by the social rules and values common to a certain intercommunicated social group. While these sections are, of course, not entirely isolated, certain rules and values can be communicated from one group to another, ,still their isolation is sufficiently marked to have social theory accept, for each such section, the principle of spatial localization elaborated by the naturalistic view of the world. The principle is not applied to the relations of rules and values existing within the domain of experience of one social group; these rules and values are socially extensive because coexisting in the experience of many members of the group, but in so far as they are social, not physical objects, they are not spatially isolated nor limited with refer-
(293) -ence to one another. But spatiality is presupposed for the relations between groups; each group with its total civilization becomes geographically localized. This idea of a geographic separation of civilization shows more clearly than anything else the relativity of the social order to the physical as well as the psychological order; while in historical reality geographic spatiality is conditioned by the concrete extension of the empirical world and the "geographical environment" exists within historical experience as a part of the world of cultural objects, from the special sociological standpoint concrete extension becomes included in the pure rational space and divided into sections with reference to the external, formal extension of the world of natural things.
The totality of social schemes and social values coexisting in a section of social reality limited to one group, embraces a great variety of cultural phenomena—political, economic, religious, moral, intellectual, aesthetic, hedonistic—and does not constitute in any sense one rational system, and the evolution of all these schemes and values does not manifest any one fundamental law. The rational theoretic order of social reality relies therefore as much on idealizing abstraction and generalization as that of psychological or physical reality. Out of the concrete complexity of the social life of a group single elements have to be theoretically isolated and a new systematic organization constructed from them.
Here again we find the possibility of two different orders, a static and a dynamic one. The distinction has become popular since Spencer expressed it, but the rather inadequate formulation which this philosopher gave to it prevented its importance from being sufficiently realized, so that in many sociological works we find it entirely obliterated. And yet there are two entirely different sets of problems implied in it—as different as the problems of the nature of things and those of the functional dependence of processes in the physical domain. On the one hand, we may study the objective
(294) nature of social schemes in the effect which each of them separately tends to have upon individual experience and behavior; that is, we investigate the perfect type of situation as it is defined socially by the scheme and as, in accordance with our presupposition of a perfect social rationality, it would always be realized in individual life if it were never interfered with by the influence of other schemes. In doing this, we should not, of course, limit ourselves to a given formulation of a scheme as it may be offered by the legal code, by religious or aesthetic canons, by current moral sayings, by theoretic judgments —expressed in spoken, written, or printed words, by economic contracts, etc.; but we should try to reconstruct comparatively, by a study of cases which can be considered approximately typical, what would be the actual working of the scheme if it did work perfectly. Thus isolated from its social context, the scheme may present such far-reaching analogies with certain schemes found in other social groups that the formation of a class becomes possible. Furthermore, schemes which differ in detail as to the particular nature of those objects and connections which they demand for the construction of their situations may still be similar with regard to the more general character of their material and to the broader outlines of the organization which they impose; thus, we can subordinate particular classes of schemes to general classes and reach a static classificatory systematization of social phenomena, of which every section of social science and every general system of sociology offer examples. If we want then synthetically to reconstruct, with the help of this static analytic system, any particular concrete fragment of social organization, we have only to find what schemes are actually working there and how their coexistence affects each of them, how they supplement or interfere with each other, $y studying comparatively the influence of various schemes upon each other, we reach a definition of various social complexes which can with more or less approximation be
(295) reduced to a relatively limited number of fundamental types. Every concrete social personality, every concrete institution, every artificially or half-artificially isolated fragment of a wider social group (a territorial unit like a village, a town, a city ward; a family group; a professional organization; a social class, etc.) is such a social complex of various working schemes, approximately reconstructible and reducible to types.
As against the problem of this static reconstruction, the problem of a dynamic order, of a rationally determinable evolution of social schemes, must appeal to completely different principles. Social reality by itself, in so far as it is perfectly social, its schemes general and stable, and its values determined by schemes, does not include any factors of evolution. To say that the cause of a social fact must be sought in another social fact, if by fact we mean, as the school of Durkheim does, the social rule in its active determination of individual experience and behavior, is as self-contradictory as would be a principle according to which the cause of a substance should be sought in another substance. A change of social schemes in a group can occur only if the old scheme has ceased to correspond actually to the prevalent experience and behavior of individual members and the new scheme has begun to correspond to them instead. This passage from the old to the new implies a period when neither the old nor the new is perfectly social, when individual experience and behavior with regard to the given values are very imperfectly determined socially, because they are determined by two different rules at once. This period of individualization is a necessary stage of every social becoming. The factor which works during this period, which makes the old scheme lose its determining power and the new scheme acquire determining power, cannot be defined in terms of social, but in terms of psychological reality. It is the attitude of the individuals who accept the situations imposed by the new scheme and reject
(296) the definition of the old scheme that brings the change. From the sociological standpoint the attitude alone cannot produce a new social rule directly from personal situations; the question of the absolute origin of the social order from non-socialized experience and reflection cannot be solved by sociology as a science of reality which presupposes an already existing social order. What individual attitudes as such can do is only to substitute within the limits of the given group one social rule for another, to modify a pre-existing social definition of personal situations so as to make it conform better with the actually experienced and constructed personal situations. The appearance of a new social scheme in a group can be explained therefore only on the ground of the combination of two antecedents: a pre-existing social scheme and an individual attitude. We have here a condition which is parallel with that found in psychological explanation; there also the appearance of a new individual attitude required two antecedents, a pre-existing attitude and a social value. Thus, while the static psychological and the static social orders are entirely distinct from each other and can be treated separately, the corresponding dynamic orders encroach upon each other; causal explanations of the psychological demand the use of social elements and vice versa.
The laws of social becoming following the general formula scheme-attitude-scheme (or, if we objectivate the scheme as a specifically sociological value, value-attitude-value) will certainly present various degrees of generality, just as do causal natural laws. These varying degrees will permit us to organize them into an abstract system. With their help, any concrete social becoming may be conceived as the result of a combination of several laws, and types of such combinations may be approximately distinguished. But this is still a question of the future, and the same point must be emphasized here which we have already raised when speaking of the natural and the psychological dynamic orders. A theoretic
(297) reconstruction of social becoming based upon the concept of laws evidently cannot pretend to explain the appearance of absolutely new forms of social schemes, since the law as such is always a law of repetition. It can only explain how a scheme, already pre-existing in concrete experience, became socialized, realized, and applied in a certain group at a certain epoch, but not how it appeared in the empirical world in general as a result of a new and spontaneous schematic determination of situations which were not schematized before.
The social order, static or dynamic, cannot cover entirely its field of reality any more than the natural and the psychological orders can exhaust their fields. There is always some irrationality left over, manifested in the impossibility of reconstructing theoretically any given static section of social reality, any given social becoming, otherwise than approximately. No concrete fragment of the social world can be synthetically reconstructed in its completeness out of schemes or laws of change—neither the total civilization of a nation, nor the cultural life of a class or of a locally isolated community within the nation, nor the concrete reality of an empirical institution with all the manifold interests of its agents and its public crossing one another in the most various and unaccountable ways, nor even the relatively limited sphere of cultural existence of a social personality. And even in so far as our synthetic reconstruction goes, we are unable to account fully either for the coexistence within the given concrete section of social reality of such schemes as we find working together or for the co-operation within this given concrete part of social becoming of such laws as we find developing together. We can construct abstractly perfect classificatory systems of hierarchically ordered schemes; we can hope to reach some day perfect abstract systems of hierarchically ordered laws; but when we have to extend our abstract, rational order to the
(298) concrete, social world, we find that it applies perfectly only to artificially isolated, and therefore also more or less abstract, combinations of schemes or causal series, whereas, as soon as we want to reconcile concreteness and rationality, the best and only methodical device which we can apply is the concept of the type, which has neither a perfect rationality, for there is no reason fully accounting for the fact that a particular type contains certain particular rational elements in a certain specific empirical combination, nor a perfect concreteness, for every concrete fragment of social reality only approximately realizes the type.
Sociology by itself is unable to overcome these difficulties, for its scientific task is to supplement psychology in rationalizing personal experience and behavior as personal and its very existence is bound to the concept of inter-personal or super-personal reality superimposed upon and therefore relative to the division between concrete psychological individuals. Therefore, in separating for sociological synthesis fragments of social reality from the whole to which they belong, we must keep on the ground of psychological personalities and follow the lines traced by their psychological isolation and social interaction; we can, in other words, separate sociologically, for theoretic reconstruction, a section of social culture from the rest, only together with the men who participate in it, who are controlled by it psychologically or are modifying it, and it is the fact of this fragment's being the social reality of certain men which permits us to treat it as a distinct fragment. Therefore back of every sociological concrete object-matter, however limited it may be, there is always the whole complexity of human personalities; however much this complexity may be reduced on account of the exclusion of the natural world from it and because of psychological rationalization, it is still irrational enough to prevent any part of reality into which it is introduced from ever being exhausted by any theoretical order.
(299) A full and rational scientific synthesis of a concrete fragment of social culture would be possible only if this fragment itself were already empirically, practically rationalized; if it included only objects perfectly determined by situations, situations perfectly determined by schemes, those schemes themselves in a limited, rationally exhaustible number and variety, and all belonging together not by the mere fact of their empirical coexistence but by a common rational determination with regard to one another. Now, these conditions are approximately found in a dogmatically organized system of schemes. The political organization of a state, a system of religion, a style of art as developed in particular works, the system of ideas constituting the ready body of a science as taught in schools, the economic organization of a trust, the technical division of labor and co-operation in a branch of industry, are examples of fragments of culture whose complexity can be assumed theoretically exhaustible and whose systematization is approximately rational. And the social order, even within the limits which it is rational, presupposes implicitly a dogmatic stabilization and imposition of schemes upon social life; otherwise there would be no ground for the assumption that any scheme will continue to work within a given section of social reality until causally supplanted by a different one.
In so far as we succeed in subdividing a sphere of social civilization into such rational fragments, the difficulties connected with the synthetic reconstruction of sections of social reality are evidently removed. But we are no longer in the domain of sociology. The reality with which we deal is no longer social in the exact sense of the term, for in the very measure in which we want such systems of schemes to be rationally perfect, we must abstractly exclude the concrete complexities of psychological individuals as their empirical foundation and limit the manifoldness of social schemes by which these psychologically separated complexities are united
(300) and determined socially. Our object-matter is no longer the group or the personality as typical combination of various social schemes. Men count exclusively as bearers of the given system, as underlying foundation upon which the system becomes realized in extension and duration. From the standpoint of a perfect state organization, a human group is not a concrete historical nation with multiform half-chaotically combined spheres of cultural interests, but exclusively a body of political beings, subjects, or citizens, determined only with regard to their rôle as governed or governing, as participating in the realization and maintenance of the state system. From the standpoint of a religious system, men are not a concrete gathering of individuals whose lives are determined not only by religious, but also by hedonistic, aesthetic, intellectual, economic, political, and similar schemes; they are an organized church, a body of purely religious beings whose only significance is to make the religious system a historical reality. From the standpoint of a ready system of art or science, they are not a scattered plurality of complicated and various personal types, but united and relatively homogeneous spheres of artists plus the public, of masters plus students, defined exclusively in view of their task of realizing and perpetuating the historical existence of the given art of science. From the standpoint of an economic system of schemes, they are homines oeconomici, the abstract human entities whose experiences and attitudes are exclusively determined by this system of schemes so that the latter can be realized; from that of a technical system, they are exclusively technical workers, planning minds, or executing hands, etc.
Of course, when we ask ourselves how a given system of schemes can be realized psychologically or sociologically, or what is its psychological or its sociological significance, we have to reintroduce the psychological individual or social type; but then the system itself is no longer a perfect rational order of definite schemes, but a disconnected set of psycho-
(301) -logical experiences or social values, to be rationally reconstructed by psychological or sociological methods. It is hardly necessary to mention that a psychological reconstruction cannot by any means follow the rational organization of such a system of schemes, but breaks the latter up into an indefinite plurality of personal subjective data or attitudes. These data are classified alongside other experiences of each psychological individual who in his own way perceives or conceives the system-experiences which have nothing to do with this system as objectively closed and rationally organized —and these attitudes are dynamically connected with other attitudes which belong to entirely different domains. But it is worth emphasizing, in view of the growing tendency to ignore this super-sociological or extra-sociological order for the benefit of sociology, that a sociological reconstruction of a political, religious, economic, aesthetic, system is as impossible as a psychological one.
The conditions of scientific development in the field of social culture have been different from those in other fields. Whereas the scientific recognition of the psychological order followed that of the physical order and the realization of a sociological order came later still—an evolution which, as we see, corresponds to the logical connection between these three types of the rationalistic ideal—the recognition and scientific treatment of dogmatically determined systems of schemes of the kind illustrated by our examples preceded often by many centuries any methodical attempts of a sociological treatment of the respective domains. Thus, the theory of the state was already highly developed in Greece, whereas consciously sociological studies of political schemes hardly go back farther than Spencer's Political Institutions; a historical theory of scientific systems begins with Aristotle, if not with Plato, whereas a systematic sociological treatment of intellectual schemes has been started just recently; economic systems are methodically studied by English economic science of the eighteenth century,
(302) whereas a sociological study of economic schemes is scarcely more than thirty years old; and so on. The reason of this will become clear when we realize—a point which will be treated presently—that the rational organization of these systems from the theoretic standpoint appears as an order of reality which, while supplementing and continuing other orders, differs from them, in that reality by its own pre-existing nature does not contribute anything to its formation; this order is an immediate and full manifestation, in the field of reality, of the logical organization of active thought. The systematic order which logical thought, by virtue of its own organization alone, tends to produce in reality and which it always would produce if not forced to comply in some measure for its own purposes with the re-existing real conditions, began to be abstractly studied long before the study of those real orders in which the pre-existing concrete reality cannot be neglected had reached the problem of the sociological order. For it is always the first impulse of theoretic reflection, in its efforts to reach the ideal of perfect rationality, to ignore the limitations which reality by its concreteness imposes upon rationalizing thought. It is not strange therefore that idealistic theories of the state, of science, of religion, of economics, etc., have been evolved before sociology started to treat these domains as subjected to its own order. Under the influence of the empirical current predominating in intellectual life during the past half of a century, the consciousness that the sociological order could be extended to fields in which up to then an ideal order was assumed and that this extension yielded unexpected and interesting discoveries, resulted in the widespread belief that there was a new and better method to be substituted for the old within political science, economic science, theory of knowledge, theory of art, etc.; whereas this extension meant that concrete empirical phenomena which were already the object-matter of these older sciences could be made also, when differently defined and taken in a
(303) different connection, the object-matter of a new science, sociology, without ceasing to be treated as realizing an ideal, non-sociological order.
The difference between the two orders becomes immediately clear when we begin to analyze sociologically the composition or the becoming of any one of these cultural systems of objects. For, if we isolate the various schemes which constitute a given political, religious, economic, or other system and study each of them separately with regard to the definition which it gives to personal situations, we shall find a great variety between the schemes in one system, which makes it evident that it is not any particular similarity which brought them together. Thus, a political system may include not only many dissimilar schemes of legislation, jurisdiction, and execution, often incorporated from completely different political groups, but also schemes of economic organization (governmental business enterprises), of intellectual and moral education (school control and press censorship), of religious institutions (state religion), etc., which cannot be classed as political by themselves but assume a political form only in so far as and because incorporated into the state system. Similarly, a religious system may not only contain religious beliefs and rites of the most heterogeneous character, but also include schemes by which it tends to control morality, art, science, politics, economics, etc., and which have a religious sanction only because subordinated to a religious dogma, as schemes whose permanent realization is claimed as necessary for the maintenance of the whole religious system in historical reality. In short, when we construct a classificatory order of schemes as we do in social statics, this order will cut across all the existing dogmatic systems of schemes, will put into one class schemes belonging to different systems and into different classes schemes belonging to the same system. From this standpoint the coexistence of certain schemes rather than others in a given political, religious, economic, dogmatic
(304) system will seem as equally "accidental," equally matter-of-fact, as the coexistence of certain schemes in the sphere of social culture of an individual or a group. The static sociological order cannot account for the rational connection of schemes in a dogmatic system; and the dynamic sociological order, on the other hand, cannot account for the exclusion of schemes which make at each moment of its existence the dogmatic system rationally exhaustible. For, from the standpoint of social causality, each of the schemes included in a political, religious, economic system appears as dynamically connected with schemes which are completely outside of political, religious, economic life, as influencing them and influenced by them, so that a causal explanation of the social origin or disappearance of any of these systems or an adequate account of all the social consequences of its existence, its development, or its decay would require practically a dynamic synthesis of the entire social life of the group within which it is realized.
The rational theoretic order based on the existence of dogmatic systems of schemes must be therefore entirely different from that which sociology postulates. Its nature will be best understood if we remember, first, that the dogmatic system manifests a tendency of active thought to subordinate reality completely to ideal demands, to control it independently of pre-existing real conditions. Secondly, we know that the dogmatic system is the highest type of practical organization of reality and, unless it is a part of another dogmatic system, is never practically conditioned by any other real organization. Therefore, while the physical object draws its determination from the situation, while the psychological situation is stable and uniform as a result of the scheme, while the continuity and generality of selfidentical schemes in social life presupposes that these schemes are determined by dogmas, the determination of the dogma is purely ideal; whatever rational perfection it possesses is
(305) directly derived from the logical systematization of the activity which constructs it and not from any superior systematization of reality. For these two reasons we call the theoretic order based upon dogmatic systems the ideal order of reality.
The ideal ground of this order manifests itself in the methodological presuppositions made by the sciences which construct it. A scientific study of dogmatic systems must, of course, postulate a perfect rationality of its object-matter, like every branch of knowledge which tends to realize the rationalistic theoretic ideal. And since it is evident that no dogmatic systems found in empirical reality are ever absolutely perfect, any more than other types of practical organization, a science which studies these systems must first of all idealize them, reconstruct them analytically as if they were perfect. Now, in view of the fact that their organization tends to be entirely independent of pre-existing reality, and approaches perfection in the very measure in which it succeeds in controlling reality completely, in subordinating it unconditionally to the demands of thought, a perfect dogmatic system would be one constructed by thought absolutely freely on the ground of an accepted dogma, without any regard to the given real conditions. Therefore a science which postulates an absolute rationality of the order based on dogmatic systems must assume that the rational organization of every system which it meets in experience possesses and manifests a perfect rational essence, follows with an ideal necessity from the dogma which it is based upon quite independent of the empirical conditions in which it is realized. Given, therefore, a certain practical dogma and a certain field of reality to control, the theorist can construct a priori a perfect system of schemes for the control of this reality and assume that, if these schemes were fully realized, the given field of reality would be fully controlled in accordance with the demands of the dogma. Of course, these schemes may as a
(306) matter of fact never be realized practically, because active thought may be unable so to organize as to overcome the obstacles which the reality to be controlled puts in the way of their realization; but this empirical lack of realization does not impair the intrinsic perfection of the rational essence of the system as constructed by the theorist.
Given a certain constitution and a reality—a social group—to be politically controlled, the political scientist can construct theoretically a perfect state system in which every scheme is rationally founded upon the constitution and which thus represents the rational essence of a state possessing such a constitution. The problem of the actual realization of each scheme in particular and of the system as a whole is completely different and has nothing to do with this problem of rational essence; on the ground of the latter the political scientist can say only that if, by whatever concrete empirical organization of human activities, all the schemes rationally demanded by the constitution are ever realized, the social group will be completely controlled in its political life in accordance with the constitution. Similarly, given a certain scientific or philosophical principle and a domain of empirically founded knowledge to be controlled by theoretic systematization, the theorist of knowledge can construct a rationally perfect scientific or philosophical system of concepts which will represent the rational essence of a theory based upon this principle. It will then be a completely different problem whether such a system of concepts is realizable in fact, whether in view of the already realized and fixed body of knowledge it is practically possible to give old ideas such interpretations or to produce by observation such new ideas as will give to the system the empirical foundation which it requires. But suppose this is done, the given domain of knowledge will be completely controlled from the standpoint of the given principle. In another field again, on the ground of the dogmas accepted by the classical or by
(307) the materialistic schools of economy and of an economic reality to be controlled by these dogmas, economists build rationally perfect systems of schemes which, if neither of them expresses the rational essence of economic life in general, correspond at least essentially to some empirical dogmatic systems among all those which can be found in the concrete complexity of economic organization. Again from the purely rational standpoint it does not matter whether the classical or the materialistic or any other economic system will ever be completely and adequately realized in the empirical world; this depends on the question whether our activity will be able to realize all the conditions necessary for the continuous actualization of the schemes demanded by the dogma.
The political scientist, the economist, the theorist of art, of religion, even the theorist of knowledge usually claims that in constructing a perfectly rational system he follows empirical data and does not act a priori. This claim is, of course, in some measure justified. First, the scientist usually does not attempt to construct rational essences or political, economic, aesthetic, theoretic, moral, religious systems which are not at least partially realized in the empirical world, and thus he limits the field of his theory to the historically given practical organizations; though this limitation is not general and the theorist, under the influence of practical considerations, often intentionally transgresses past and present empirical reality and builds non-existing systems in the expectation that these will be realized in the future, still this is not considered a properly scientific activity. Furthermore, in order to construct the rational essence of any system, the scientist must be acquainted with the practical activities to which the organization of empirical systems of this type is due and with the reality upon which these activities bear. He cannot construct a political system, a moral system, a religious system, an aesthetic system, by theoretic reflection alone, for the rational
(308) organization which theoretic reflection creates in reality is not the same as the rational organizations which political, moral, religious, aesthetic activities create. He must practically realize what political, moral, religious, aesthetic activities are; that is, he must be able to reproduce these activities mentally, though not instrumentally. It is precisely because, and only because, these activities can be reproduced, or produced, mentally that he can substitute for his scientific purposes a rationally perfect dogmatic practical system for those rationally imperfect ones which are instrumentally realized in the historical world. The actual subject-matter of his science is not the empirically given and fully real system which has been or is being constructed by others with the help of instrumental activities, but a model system of the same type which he practically constructs himself with the help of activities of the same class, only mental. Mentally performed political, economic, moral, aesthetic activities do not meet such obstacles in the pre-existing reality as instrumental activities do, and therefore a mentally constructed dogmatic system of schemes can be at once rationally perfect and can serve as material for the theoretic determination of the rational essence of systems of this type. Such a mentally constructed practical system corresponds, in sciences of ideally ordered reality, to the experiment in physical science; it is an artificially created model of perfect rationality.
When a political scientist determines the rational essence of an absolute monarchy or of a democratic republic, he performs a double activity: first, he performs practically, though only mentally, all the activities which a political sovereign would have to reproduce instrumentally in organizing a state in accordance with a certain constitution; secondly, as a theorist, he reconstructs this mental organization scientifically, using this time all the materials and instruments necessary to produce a fully objective and rational system of ideas. The problem of the empirical bearing of a science of the ideal
(309) order is not how a dogmatic organization existing in the empirical world can be theoretically reconstructed in general; we know that it can be in so far as its schemes are practically limited in their number and complexity; but the question is, "How can all the existing practical organizations of a certain class be theoretically systematized?" And this depends on the question of how far such political, economic, aesthetic, or religious systems, serving as basis for the theoretic reconstruction of rational essences, actually correspond to the instrumentally realized political, economic, aesthetic, or religious systems. Since every science tries to reconcile rationality with concreteness, to reach a theoretic systematization as perfect as the reality upon which it bears permits, and to keep as closely in touch with empirical reality as its rationalistic ideal allows, the normal tendency of political science, of economics, of theory of art, of theory of religion, will be on the one hand to construct such model systems as would correspond each to as many as possible empirical organizations; and on the other hand to take as far as possible into consideration and to explain rationally the deviations which each of these empirical organizations present as compared with the model system which is assumed to express their rational essence.
The first tendency leads to a hierarchical classification of rational essences with regard to the generality of their empirical application: for example, the rational essence formulated in the concept "state" has a wider field of application than those expressed by the terms "absolute monarchy," "constitutional monarchy," "republic." The general scientific concepts reached in this domain are those which serve as ground for separating the sciences of cultural systems from one another. Thus, at the basis of the separation between the political and economic sciences lies the assumption that there is a common rational essence of all political systems and a different common rational essence of all economic systems. Neither
(310) of these rational essences can be reduced to the other, and thus all efforts to reduce the political to the economic, like the one which historical materialism has tried, are rooted in a misunderstanding. Of course, in the concrete social life of a group we can find innumerable relations of partial dependence between particular political and particular economic schemes, and vice versa; but the study of these relations is the task of sociology, not of political or economic science, and involves, as we have already seen, an isolation of the schemes thus connected by social causality from the several different systems in which they are connected with other schemes by a rational determination for the fulfilment of the demands of the respective dogmas. Since the fundamental difference between the sciences of the ideal order of reality and sociology is that the object-matter of the former is the dogmatic organization of schemes which the latter ignores, by treating schemes of rationally different systems as causally dependent on one another and thus dissolving the systems we simply substitute sociology for political or economic science.
With regard to the deviations of empirical systems from their rational essence, sciences of the ideal order began first by assuming generally that, since all rationality of these systems comes from the logical order of thought, all break of rational order comes from the irrational empirical reality and therefore cannot be rationally explained. This is the stand taken by ancient science. But modern science in its effort to reconcile concreteness with rationality can no longer be satisfied with such a summary solution. The latter is, moreover, in disaccordance with the very principle of the ideal order which is not supposed to be dependent on real conditions. In the very measure in which we assume that active thought is able completely to control reality, we cannot admit that the latter puts in the way of dogmatically determined systems obstacles which active thought is entirely unable to overcome. From the standpoint of the ideal order, the imperfect realiza-
(311) -tion of a rational essence in an empirical system of schemes must be taken to be the result of an incomplete formal organization of the activities whose task it is to realize this essence within the given sphere of reality, not as the result of insuperable material hindrances. However, the sciences of the ideal order cannot study the absolute origin of this order in creative activity; just like all other sciences, they must assume the order on which their investigation bears as existing and ready before it becomes the object-matter of theoretic reflection, even if it should be only mentally realized by the scientist himself, for the existence of this order is the very foundation of theoretic rationalization. An attempt to explain by the nature of active thought why the latter succeeded or did not succeed in organizing a system perfectly would lead to the whole problem of the logical order of activities, which is beyond the reach of any science of reality. And since there is no higher organization of reality by which its dogmatic organization is determined and explicable, the sciences dealing with dogmatic systems cannot be supplemented by any other sciences of reality and have thus to rely exclusively on the ideal order itself to explain the imperfections of this very order.
This means that of the two principles with the help of which theoretic reflection tries to reconcile concreteness with rationality, the principle of approximation and that of interference, the sciences of the ideal order have to reject entirely the first and give to the second a form and development which it does not possess in any other branch of knowledge. These sciences cannot admit that the rational essence of a dogmatic system may be realized only approximately or that for any reasons such a system may fail in attaining perfect rationality; but they must assume that any number of dogmatic systems of a similar or different type may coexist, each perfectly developed, in a given section of the cultural world. And thus, if in the political organization of a group we do not find
(312) some of the schemes realized which the constitution demands, if a system of science or philosophy which we are studying seems to lack some of the concepts required for the full theoretic application of its fundamental principles, if an empirical economic system does not show in practice all the schemes necessary for the realization of the dogma, we must assume nevertheless that these schemes do exist and that if we do not find them in observation, it is because they have not reached the same degree of realness as those which we do observe. We must implicitly suppose that the political schemes which, though required by the constitution, are not manifestly realized in the group, nevertheless already exist within the total sphere of civilization of this group. We must implicitly assume that the concepts which, though demanded by the principles of, a philosophic or scientific system, are not formulated in words, nevertheless already exist in the domain of knowledge; that the economic schemes rationally necessary for the perfection of an economic organization are already there in economic life, though we cannot find them. Such assumptions are implied in the very fact of treating an empirical system as identical with the ideal system theoretically reconstructed by the scientist, though they do not involve, of course, any positive supposition as to where and when the schemes whose existence we postulate have been realized. Sometimes, indeed, such an implicit assumption becomes the starting-point of a research, and we often find in fact that the political schemes which at first glance seem to be lacking really exist in the political practice of the group or of some of its members, though they are not formulated; that the concepts which are not expressed in the works of the scientist or the philosopher have been in fact constructed by him, though not made public; that an apparently incomplete business organization already includes a plan for more complete development. In other cases, the theoretic reconstruction of a system as
(313) rationally perfect becomes the starting-point of a practical activity which will realize in the empirical system the schemes that seem to be lacking and will thus make it express fully its rational essence; the study of the political organization of a country gives the initiative for new laws, and the critical analysis of a scientific system starts new observations. But from the purely formal rational standpoint such questions have a secondary importance: for the rational perfection of the system it does not matter by whom and under what conditions its schemes have been brought into existence nor how much reality they possess, provided they exist already—and they certainly do exist at least mentally at the moment when the theorist begins to investigate them.
On the other hand, if in a given domain of cultural reality we find together with schemes necessary for a dogmatic system other schemes which do not belong to it rationally, we must assume that there is another system existing in this domain with more or less realness, and that these superfluous schemes are a part of it. This is a very frequent case. In every social group we find several different political, economic, religious systems existing together, and our task is then to separate them and to reconstruct each in its rational perfection. We have consciously attempted to do it elsewhere;[7] more or less clear illustrations of this method can be found in many historical monographs.
Following these two postulates in which the principle of interference expresses itself in the sciences of the ideal order—the postulate that in each empirical system its total rational essence exists, though not always with the same degree of realness, and the postulate that each scheme which does not belong to a given system must belong to another—every science of the ideal order can approach a complete theoretic exhaustion and systematization of its field. These sciences
(314) are the only ones which find in their way no empirical real concreteness necessary and yet essentially impossible to overcome, since their object-matter is originally as much rationalized as practical reality can be, and their method, by ignoring the degree of realness which their order possesses, leaves to them only such irrationality to deal with as comes not from the pre-existing real chaos, but from the imperfect organization of activity.
But it is evident that there can be only a static, not a dynamic, ideal order of reality, since the ultimate factor of all evolution here is active thought, and therefore no order of reality, however highly idealized, can explain it. There is no possible scientific theory of the evolution of political organization, of morality, of economics, of knowledge, of religion, of art, of technique. Science can follow the succession of different systems in history; it can dissolve these systems and explain sociologically the origin of each scheme composing them; but a dogmatic system in the intrinsic essence of its organization is for science a rationally analyzable but genetically inexplicable datum, whose source lies beyond the reach of science, in creative activity.
THE PROBLEM OF THE UNITY OF KNOWLEDGE
The rationalistic ideal of knowledge, when applied to reality in so far as already in some measure practically organized, finds, as we see, a double limitation. First, none of the general presuppositions by which philosophy tries to determine once and forever the essential character of objects and their connections, by qualifying them as physical, or psychological, or sociological, or elements of ideal systems, are anything more than methodological assumptions, objectively justified by being approximately realized within certain practical systems and apt to be theoretically postulated beyond these systems, but unable to become ontological truths about reality in general. This means that there can
(315) be no systematic philosophical theory of reality as of a rational whole—beyond, of course, a mere study of the forms which reality acquires as object-matter of practice and of knowledge, like the study we have attempted here. Even the possibility of our present study, as we shall see in another work, is ultimately due to the fact that all forms of reality, even though entirely different from the forms of active thought, are directly or indirectly derived from them. All that can be done by theoretic reflection about reality is to reconstruct rationally, on the ground of certain methodological presuppositions, fragment after fragment of the empirical world, thus approaching indefinitely to the ideal limit of its complete theoretic exhaustion. And even if this limit were ever attained, still there would be no place for a philosophical ontology based on the general nature of reality besides the sciences based on the particular empirical phenomena. For, when gradually reconstructing reality scientifically on the assumption of a certain formal order, we unify indeed disconnected fragments into one rational system and thus generalize this order; but the unity of the system is directly and in itself a unity of knowledge, not of reality, and becomes a unity of reality only as a dynamic connection superimposed upon the disconnected practical world when the ideas constituting the theoretic system are actualized as thoughts in application to reality.
A rational order, by being generalized by science, does not become one inherent order of reality absolutely imposing itself upon our thought; it exists only as a set of innumerable particular suggestions offered by objects, beside other suggestions, as a plurality of specific meaning which in each particular case thought is free to follow or not, and which it regularly follows only when logically determined by the system of knowledge which has created those meanings, when applying again in actuality this system to its original object-matter. Therefore the methodological presuppositions
(316) with the help of which we construct our theoretic system never can become ontological truths bearing upon the entire reality covered by this system; they remain methodological forever, they serve to "rediscover" rational determinations of empirical reality every time the ready system is actualized by being applied to experience, just as they served to "discover" them when the system was first constructed. The specifically "theoretic" suggestions which the objects offer —their suggestions to be taken in accordance with their scientific determination—may grow more and more powerful with every application of the system; but the theoretic order is always actually being extended only to particular objects or groups of objects and for particular purposes, never actually applied to all objects at once, in general and absolutely, independently of specific theoretic or practical problems.
This first limitation of the theoretic ideal should not be taken in the Kantian sense. It is not merely the Kantian world of things-in-themselves, but also the very world which Kant qualified as phenomenal and which philosophy was supposed to master in the very essence of its order, which is in fact inaccessible to philosophical reconstruction—for the "forms a priori" which theoretic reason imposes upon it are not in fact necessary forms of our "phenomenal" reality, are not transcendental conditions with which experience must conform. What makes precisely all attempts of philosophy to construct an absolute theory of empirical reality hopeless is that any forms of reality which it may find assumed in scientific research are partly objectively realized before science and partly not, and that science by postulating their perfect realization imposes nothing upon reality absolutely and unconditionally, but only gives to itself the task of trying step by step to superimpose upon the imperfect real order a more perfect one. These forms are not in any sense the necessary conditions of experience, or even of organized experience, for concrete experience lacks them and practically
(317) organized experience never perfectly realizes them. If they are now the universally used methodical assumptions of our science, it is because our science in its historical development has not only accepted the general ideal of rationality, but also the specific tendency to advance toward this ideal by the way of extending and perfecting in its own systems the pre-existing practical organization of reality, instead of taking some other, logically equally possible way. Perhaps an adequate history of science would even show that it has often tried in the past to branch off into different lines. Now it is so stabilized in its fundamental tendencies that for a long time there is scarcely any possibility of its changing its methodological ground; and if it changed this, it would no longer be science in the historically accepted sense of the term.
But the very fact that the forms which science uses as its methodological presuppositions are neither the necessary forms of experience nor those of knowledge, and are only imperfectly realized in practice, gives a significance to the future progress of science which it could not possess under the Kantian conception. For, if historically developing science were only getting from reality the order which non-historical absolute reason had for all time put into reality, what would be the objective importance of such work ? Whereas by actually superadding to the imperfect rationality of reality a growingly perfect one, science performs a creative function which has an objective significance even apart from its practical applications, by introducing something new into the world.
But even the ideal limits toward which scientific progress tends lack, as we have seen in the preceding sections, that absolute perfection of rationality which philosophy used to require by believing in one theoretic system of reality. Not only is it true that reality cannot be exhausted in one theoretic system now, but it never will be, even if all its fragments and aspects ever should become completely rationalized theoretically in particular scientific researches. For the results of
(318) scientific activity, by the very nature of the methodological assumptions which determine the ways of stating and solving scientific problems, can under no condition be unified into one system of knowledge. We have followed the division of scientific fields as it has actually developed in history and we have found that, when science takes as fundamental the physical order of reality, that is, an order based exclusively on the perfect practical form of objects and connections but ignoring the practical organizations within which they receive this form, it must add to this order three other entirely incommensurable, though supplementary, orders, built with entirely different methodological presuppositions, so that reality presents four different rational aspects based upon the fundamental forms of different stages of practical organization: the thing, the situation, the scheme, the dogma.
Suppose now that, by some radical modification of the entire body of our scientific knowledge, science should ever accept as fundamental not the physical order of things, but the ideal order of dogmatic systems corresponding to the highest stage of practical organization; suppose that the sciences of cultural instead of those of natural reality should constitute the rational basis of our theoretic reflection. Since the dogmatic system contains all the subordinate stages of practical organization—schemes, situations, and things—there would then be no reason for supplementing this order by the social, psychological, and physical orders; for all the social schemes, personal situations, physical things, and processes would find place and rationalization within the scope of an order of dogmatic systems, if the latter were not reduced, as they must be now, to an ideal order ignoring pre-existing concrete reality, but were studied in all the details of their practical development in the historical world. A full knowledge of cultural reality would be a rational knowledge of entire reality as practically determined, and yet, even then, scientific unity would not be attainable. For on the ground
(319) of cultural reality we have several entirely different types of rational practical systems, such as theoretic, aesthetic, moral, religious, political, economic, technical; and supposing even that each of these types should be theoretically reduced to a perfect rational unity, the scientific systems constructed on the basis of these different types would still remain entirely separated and different from one another. And since each of these systems, if fully developed, would extend over the entire reality—for it is clear that the entire reality could be viewed from the theoretic, the aesthetic, the moral, the religious, the technical standpoint—we would have still as many different incommensurable and disconnected theoretic aspects of reality as there are theoretically irreducible types of cultural systems of schemes.
Thus, the concept of a theoretic rationality of the entire real world, even if taken as an ideal of knowledge, must reconcile itself with a pluralistic interpretation of science; it can mean only that if the ultimate limit of scientific development were ever attained, every fragment or aspect o: reality would be scientifically determined by some rational system of ideas built from the standpoint of some rational order. The concept of a realistic rational monism, of one theoretic system embracing all empirical reality, is not even an ideal: it is a chimera.
There is, however, one imaginable objection against this pluralistic conclusion, on a ground which has already been used to maintain the possibility of reconstructing concrete reality, at least in its most important features, by one science. Does not the limitation of each of the scientific orders outlined above come from the very fact that none of them deals directly with the original concrete world of historical objects, but with one-sidedly and narrowly determined, isolated fragments of this world—practically organized systems? And is there not one prominent branch of knowledge whose object-matter is the total historical reality in its primary
(320) empirical concreteness ? Is not therefore historical knowledge, in the widest sense of the term, the one and the only knowledge which can reconstruct theoretically the whole reality without any distinction of abstract and incommensurable orders? The problem is very interesting indeed, and we regret not to be able to give it here the whole attention it deserves, but to be obliged to limit ourselves to a few general remarks.
First of all, there can be a question here only of a history of reality; the problem of a history of activity does not bear directly upon the theoretic reconstruction of reality as a whole. Most of what is called history is history of reality, cultural and natural. Now, it is clear that the history of reality does not work upon the presupposition of any general historical rational order, distinct from the special physical, psychological, sociological, and ideal orders. The only presupposition which distinguishes it from each and all of these special sciences is that in concrete historical extension and duration some or all of these orders are interconnected and melted in a general creative becoming, in a continuous development of the new which cannot be explained on the ground of any definite rational order and can be only approximately reached from case to case, as an imperfectly accountable synthesis of several orders. Even natural history, already limited by the naturalistic viewpoint to one abstract side of historical becoming, cannot work within its limits on the assumption of one historical order as such, but on that of an imperfectly rationalizable synthesis of the static order of things and the dynamic order of processes. And we know that cultural history needs all of the scientific orders together to reconstruct any past historical object or set of historical objects. We find physical, psychological, sociological, ideal presuppositions at work in every historical investigation, whether its task is the biography of an individual, or the history of a group, or the reconstruction of any past concrete domain of art, religion, literature, science,
(321) etc., in their historical connections with other domains of the cultural world.
All these methodological presuppositions can be used in two entirely different manners, depending on the purpose of historical investigation. Historical reconstruction of the past may be nothing but an auxiliary activity preparing materials for other, systematic, sciences; or it may be an aim in itself, for which other scientific researches with their specific methods are merely auxiliary activities preparing instruments. In the first case history of the past plays the same rôle as observation of the present: it brings within the range of the scientist select data which he will use for physical, psychological, sociological, cultural, generalizations. Its object is not reconstruction of historical reality in its empirical concreteness, but selection and collection of such abstractly isolated fragments of reality as can be treated from the standpoint of a certain theoretic order. In this sense, historical investigation is in some measure a part of almost every scientific research, since we seldom find everything we need to construct our theoretic systems within the immediate reach of our present practical experience and must rely more or less on realities which are no longer practically actual, or not practically actual within our part of concrete extension, so that we must reproduce them indirectly, "mentally, " with the help of other experiences or testimonies of other people. There is nothing in history when thus used which would justify its conception as of one separate and independent branch of intellectual activity. A psychological, sociological, political, aesthetic, theory based partly or even entirely upon the reconstructed culture of past peoples does not belong in the, sphere of "historical science" any more than does a physical or astronomical theory using the experiments or observations made a few years ago by a scientist who since died.
History as separate and self-determined pursuit appears only when the most exact possible reproduction of historical
(322) objects as such becomes its fundamental interest, and all the methodological presuppositions and theoretic generalizations of other sciences are used for the sole purpose of obtaining with their help the most adequate possible acquaintance with the past, either by excluding on their ground suppositions about the past which would not fit into our world in so far as already determined by its practical organization and in some measure by its theoretic orders, or, more fruitfully, by supplementing with their help such insufficient and incomplete data as can be directly obtained by oral or written tradition. But history in this sense is not theoretic reconstruction: it is creative continuation of the past in the most emphatic sense of the term. A historical work is, of course, by its rational form, its symbolic expression, its material existence as a book, a new cultural object. But the ultimate significance of its content, of the subject-matter of historical thought, is not to be an aesthetic picture of historical reality as opposed to the reality pictured, but that reality itself, brought to life again with the help of its present remnants as materials and theoretic ideas as instruments. Without this creative revival, without this conscious reproduction, past culture would after a time disappear completely from the sphere of our experience; it would lose almost entirely its realness without being exactly annihilated. Reproduced by history, historical objects reappear in our experience with a new real influence, become actualized again, usually indeed—as we have seen in a previous chapter—with different connections, in different complexes and systems, often much less important practically than they used to be. Sometimes, however, they become even more important; who does not know, for example, how much more social influence the social personality of a national hero or of a religious founder often has when historically reproduced than when still materially and psychologically existing
Because of this actual, present reality of historically re-created values, we can in some measure justify the principle
(323) brought forward first by German methodologists and recognized more or less generally since—the principle of axiological selection of historical object-matter. Since the ultimate problem of history is not theoretic study, but real preservation and revival of historical objects in their empirical concreteness, it is only natural if each historian, each nation, each epoch, tends to reproduce first of all historical objects which seem to them most worth preserving because of the influence which they still may have upon future cultural life when historically revived. The danger of such a selection, if too uniformly and consistently pursued, lies only in an undue limitation of the field for a time, which may result in a general narrowing of the cultural interests and views of the individual or the group; this danger is particularly imminent if the standards of selection, instead of being sincerely accepted as purely personal or national, are claimed to be absolute. German historiography of the nineteenth century and the consequences of its influence on the social and cultural life of the German nation constitute perhaps the best known and most radical proof of the importance of this danger.
In so far as the problem of the actual historical reproduction of any selected historical object or set of objects is concerned, several methodological questions are raised which cannot be discussed here in detail. The first, chief point is that, since the ideal of history is the revival of past reality as it was and a total reproduction of concrete historical objects in their whole content and meaning is practically impossible, history must try to reproduce at least all those characteristics of each concrete individual historical object which were most important at the time of its full realness; that is, those in which its own determination by other objects and its influence on other objects were most widely and most durably manifested. This has nothing to do with the application of the concept of type to historical reality (Rickert), which results not in general historical reproduction of the concrete but in special sociological theoretic reconstruction. The second
(324) point is the necessity, imposed by the same ideal, of avoiding as far as possible all additions to the reproduced historical object and of determining its content and its meaning in a way which as closely as possible reproduces its past determinations. This possibility is also limited by the very fact that, in order to have a cultural object which no longer belongs to our sphere of reality actually given, we must often in some measure re-create its content with the help of now given contents; but the arbitrariness of our reproduction can be indefinitely diminished by taking the historical object in connection with other objects of the same period and the same domain of concrete extension, by reproducing it as an element of a whole past civilization and thus supplementing the deficiencies in the reproduction of its contents by a more exact determination of its meaning as it really was. It is always difficult to trace the exact dividing line between re-creation and new creation; history will always border on art, and often may pass the border. But their methodological tendencies as conditioned by their ideals are different; precisely because history does not want to be art but intends to reproduce pre-existing reality, it makes use of scientific concepts which art in its desire for creation of new reality must ignore.
In every empirical historical investigation we find both intentions characterized above—that of preparing materials for some science and that of reviving historical objectsmore or less intimately coexisting. Historical preparation of scientific materials demands reproduction of the past with more or less concreteness, and reproduction of the past with the help of scientific concepts is possible only by a synthesis of various abstract aspects of past historical objects. Not the result of historical investigation at a given stage, but the direction in which it progresses, characterizes it either as a preparatory, scientific activity or as a specifically practical, re-creative activity. It is the former, if we see it progress
(325) from the concrete historical chaos toward a rational systematization of phenomena determined from the standpoint of some theoretic order; it is the latter if it advances from a provisional systematic organization of phenomena in accordance with various theoretic orders toward a reproduction of the concrete historical chaos. Only in the first case it is essentially scientific; but then the order which it introduces is always a specific, limited, abstract order, one of those which we have outlined above. In the second case, though it uses science, it consists in empirically practical, not in ideally theoretic, creation and the realization of this aim is the more perfect, the more exactly the chaotic historical reality is reproduced. Thus history cannot furnish us with a universal theoretic order of concrete reality independent of its practical organization and superior to all special scientific orders, since in so far as it is theoretic, it must treat concrete reality from the standpoint of some abstract and special scientific order; whereas in so far as it tends to embrace reality in its historical concreteness, it is not theoretic and does not order it at all.
THE INSTRUMENTAL RUE OF SCIENCE
We have considered knowledge in its reference to the practical organization of reality as to its object-matter. But in speaking of historical reproduction we have already approached a different connection between theory and practice, which is the opposite of the former; the results of science can become the object-matter of all kinds of practical activity. This question has become actual particularly because of the emphasis put by pragmatism upon the practical application of knowledge, and we regret the necessity of dividing it and limiting ourselves exclusively top that side of it which concerns the role played by ready scientific ideas in the construction of practical systems, postponing to a later time the connection between practical and theoretic activities as such, and in
(326) particular the question whether and how theoretic activity originates and develops in the course of practical activity and vice versa. In whatever way a scientific idea has been produced, whether for the satisfaction of a practical need or for the realization of theoretic ideal, it certainly can be taken out of the theoretic system of which it is a part and used for practical purposes. The problem is what this use consists in and how it influences the theoretic and the practical organization of reality.
It is evident, first of all, that theoretic ideas are used exclusively in the non-instrumental period of activity during which the system of reality—the future situation, and similarly also the future schematic system of situations, and the future dogmatic system of schemes—is constructed; but as yet it is constructed only "mentally"; it has not passed into the state when instruments begin to be used for the realization of the determined aim on the ground of the selected pre-existing reality. This period, during which the aim is being determined and the materials and instruments chosen, is, as we have seen, practically qualified as subjective as against the period of instrumental realization. Of course, when we speak of it as of a definite period, preceding the period of instrumental realization, it does not mean that all the "subjective" activities must be performed necessarily before any "objective," instrumental activities can start, since in fact they usually overlap each other more or less; noninstrumental activities are scattered among instrumental activities and vice versa; but the more rationally organized activity becomes, the more clearly are the mental and instrumental acts segregated, and the more distinct is their separation in time. When the first, non-instrumental part of practical activity makes use of theoretic ideas, this use is called planning, and the second, instrumental part assumes, with reference to the plan superimposed upon the practical organization of reality, the character of fulfilment.
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In planning, the theoretic idea is used as a specific instrument by which the connections mentally established between the objects, or systems of objects, from which a system is constructed acquire at once an objectivity intermediary between a simple actual "imagined" connection and one already realized with the help of other instruments in the practical world. The connection established with the help of ideas does not cease to be dependent on thought, does not resolve itself into static properties and relations, or a causally conditioned process; but, although dependent on active thought for its actual realization, it is founded on the rational order of reality as to the meaning and content which it gives to the connected objects. Planning, while still qualified practically subjective in so far as actually performed by an individual, has at the same time an objective aspect in so far as the individual, while performing it, acts on the ground of his knowledge of the objectively organized and rationally determined reality.
The idea can play the rôle of an instrument for planning because of its double character, both ideal and real. As objectivated thought, it can be actualized in its essential content at any moment, while on the other hand its content, being based on a more or less wide area of rationally determined reality, transcends the actual spheres of experience and reflection of the individual who actualizes it, and being objectively stabilized in its generality is very little dependent on the particular modification which the individual may give to it in the course of his present experience and reflection. Therefore, by treating the particular object actually given to him as an element of a theoretically defined class embraced by an idea and by determining its content and meaning on the ground of this idea, as supplementing and controlling his present experience and reflection, the individual raises this determination above the limitation of the here and now and makes it independent of any "nonessential" con-
(328) -nections which the unique and irrational development of his personality may bring with it.
Of course, the individual's determination of practical objects is always made with regard to his actual practical intention and in connection with other present objects. It is always only a certain aspect of the given object, or system of objects, that he is interested in—the aspect by which this object can be incorporated into the situation which he wants to construct or by which this system can become a part of some wider system that he is planning. The constructive side of planning always is and remains practical; the aim is spontaneously qualified, the practical materials and instruments spontaneously selected, by practical, not by theoretic reflection. But every practical determination given to an object with reference to other objects, every practical qualification of the aim with reference to the already selected and defined instruments and materials, every choice and practical definition of a material or an instrument relative to other materials and in view of the aim as already determined, are subjected in perfectly purposeful activity to the theoretically reflective control of ideas, to theoretic criticism. Any practical determination which cannot be justified theoretically, which cannot be treated as a particular application of a general idea or of a synthesis of general ideas, but seems merely the result of the concrete actual set of personal tendencies and experiences, is excluded as subjective, as unwarranted by the rational order of reality, and only those determinations are admitted into the plan which have stood the theoretic test. The plan is the common result of practical production and theoretic criticism; on its ideal side it represents an expurgated theoretic reconstruction, a model copy of the actual practical system of objects on the ground of which the aim is h be realized] on its real side, it is an objective, perfectly rational order introduced into the partly subjective, imperfectly rational organization of reality which the individual,
(329) or a number of co-operating individuals, has actually reached at the moment when his aim is ready, his instruments and materials selected, and fulfilment begins. The real empirical organization as we find it in practical life, is, of course, never completely identical with the plan, in that it always contains practical features which would not stand the test of theoretic criticism; but such features are not supposed to influence instrumental activity; the practical problem which the latter will solve is supposed to be entirely expressed in the plan.
When activity passes to the fulfilment of the plan, this fulfilment becomes in turn a practical test of the applicability of the ideas which have been used in building the plan, to the particular practical conditions to which they have been applied. The plan is evidently realizable only if it takes fully and adequately into account the pre-existing real nature of the instruments and materials in their reciprocal relation with regard to the realization of the given aim. An idea may be based on such characters of the empirical object or system of objects as either do not possess a sufficient degree of reality to serve for the realization of the given aim, or else, even if sufficiently real, are irrelevant for the given practical situation, or group of situations, because they do not correspond to the requirements of other objects, or systems, on which the realization of the aim will be based. The first case is found, for instance, if the savage, in his plan of a technical situation, makes use of his knowledge of the magical properties of things. The magical properties are not entirely unreal since they have at least a recognized existence within the spheres of experience and reflection of the given social group for many generations; the degree of their realness is quite sufficient to reach with their help an economic, a political, a religious aim, but it is not on the same level with that of physical properties and therefore, since a technical aim requires instruments with a high degree of realness, their introduction into a technical situation is a mistake. The
(330) second type of mistake is committed, for instance, when an inexperienced technical worker selects for the given technical situation a certain kind of material on the ground of his general knowledge of such physical properties of this class of material as may have served to realize the given aim in other situations in connection with different other materials and with the help of different instruments, but are of no use in the present situation because they are not the properties which this material is required to possess in view of the nature of the instruments and of other materials which are in this particular situation at the disposal of the worker.
But those mistakes are practical failures, not theoretic errors. The mistake does not consist in judging that the given objects as members of a class possess properties which they do not possess, for they do possess them in some degree at least, since these properties have entered into the definition of the class to which these objects belong; but it does consist in trying to use them on the ground of these properties for the realization of a certain practical aim in connection with certain other pre-existing objects with which they cannot be used for this purpose. Theoretic reflection can show only whether, by assuming the possession of certain properties by certain objects, I am "illusioning myself"; that is, whether these objects possess these properties only within the limits of my present personal experience and reflection, or whether these objects are "really" such as they seem to be here and now; whether they belong to a class whose members are known as endowed with these particular properties in the already existing rational order of reality. But what use I shall make of objects endowed with these properties in my present practical activity, after having found that my view of them is theoretically justified, is a purely practical problem.
The whole question is the same when it concerns relations, processes, or groups of interrelated objects and series of processes included in a situation. I can, for example, test
(331) theoretically the assumption that a certain process is the cause of another process; how to make use of this knowledge in practice, how to construct a situation in which this causal relation will be actually realized and, being realized, will contribute to the attainment of a definite end, is not a matter of knowledge, and my success or failure has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of my theoretic idea. All the determinations of things, processes, relations, constituting a practical situation may be each separately tested by theoretic reflection, and they are thus tested in building a perfect plan; but how this plan can be practically fulfilled in its totality, whether all this information of detail is so combined in the plan as to make the planned situation practically solvable now and here, is evidently not the business of the science to which we owe this information.
Our theoretic control may, indeed, go farther still, and we may test theoretically the objectivity and rationality of the whole situation, the practical method of combining all the theoretically tested elements of the situation, of stating and solving this particular practical problem; we make then a theoretic criticism of the situation. But it is beyond the reach of our theory whether, when, and how this situation, as theoretically tested both with regard to its elements and with regard to their combination, will be practically realized. It is the task of practice to create the auxiliary situations necessary for the construction of this main situation, and it is a practical mistake if we begin to construct a schematically determined situation, whether theoretically tested or not, without having the possibility of preparing all that is necessary for its realization. The same thing repeats itself on higher stages of theoretic control which, to be practically efficient, must be dominated by and subordinated to still wider and more complete practical organizations. When in carrying out a plan all of whose parts have been tested by theoretic reflection, we succeed or fail in attaining the expected result, our success or failure is not a
(332) test of the validity of our knowledge, but of our ability to use our knowledge for the given practical purposes; it does not show whether our ideas are practically applicable or not, but whether in the practical construction of our plan, we have selected ideas which are utilizable in the given practical conditions and combined them in a way which makes the whole plan practically realizable within the given sphere of practical reality. Science cannot organize practice: it can only furnish ideas—instruments by using which practice may spontaneously attain at once a higher level of rationality, provided it selects for its planning in each particular case the proper ideas and uses them in the proper way.
Of course, if we take a certain set of practical problems from the standpoint of these problems theoretic ideas may be classified into useful, directly or indirectly, and useless. Thus, from the standpoint of material technique ideas bearing on the physical order of things and processes are directly utilizable, whereas among those concerning the psychological, sociological, ideal orders some can be used only indirectly, and others not at all. Ideas must also express general and permanent empirical characteristics of the reality of a certain order if we want them to be widely and permanently applicable; thus, the idea of a physical property which is seldom found in experience, or that of a psychological datum or attitude which is peculiar to some supernormal or subnormal individuals, is of little practical use. Finally, at a certain level of practical organization only ideas below a certain degree of abstractness are valuable, whereas others whose practical significance would appear only if practical activity reached a systematic unity permitting the subordination of many particular situations and schemes to a common fundamental dogma, remain provisionally classed as purely speculative, that is, as having no other significance than that of helping to systematize theoretic ideas. Thus, when material technique in Greece was disconnected and
(333) chaotic, as is social technique at the present moment, the speculations of philosophers about the composition of matter had no practical interest whatever; whereas now the discussion between atomism and energetism assumes more and more practical importance as bearing on the way of stating and solving theoretic problems which in the present condition of technique evidently are or will be practically utilized.
The effects which the practical application of scientific ideas has upon the development of the practical organization of reality is thus due not to a substitution of theoretic activity for practical activity in organizing situations, schemes, and systems of schemes, but to the fact that practical activity, by using the results of theoretic activity as instruments for planning, can reach more rapidly a higher degree of rationality in the organization which it gives to its object-matter. The rôle of the idea is exactly similar in this respect to that of any other instrument: it does not diminish the demands put on practical creation; it does not allow us to dispense with any practical organizing efforts; but it helps to increase the efficiency of these efforts and thus, on the one hand, to economize innumerable trials and repetitions in reaching a certain organization, and on the other hand to widen the sphere of possible achievements.
The scientific idea or system of ideas corresponds in every field, as we have seen, to the highest degree of rational perfection which the practical organization of reality has reached in the given line; more than this, not satisfied with the rational order already produced, it gives practical activity the incentive to create still more perfect systems, by having it prepare with the help of practical instruments—collect, classify, isolate—fragments of reality for theoretic observation, and particularly by inducing it to experiment. In this way, when in planning a practical situation we use theoretic definitions for the objects included in it, when in creating a scheme we define theoretically in advance the situations in
(334) which it will be realized, when in producing a dogmatic system of schemes we express those schemes in abstract theoretic concepts instead of limiting ourselves to practical concrete experiences and activities, in each of these cases we shape the constitutive parts of our present practical organization in accordance with a rational model and are thus able to give them at once a definiteness, a generality, and a permanence of determination which otherwise they could attain only after numerous repeated practical attempts. Compare, for instance, the rapidity with which any new branch of mechanical technique reaches now an almost perfect rational organization with the slow perfecting of all industries in primitive societies or even, using a modern example, of agriculture everywhere until a hundred years ago.
The second effect of the use of ideas, the widening of the range of practical creation, is directly due to the scientific systematization of knowledge. This systematization in each science unifies in a body a vast complexity of rational forms of reality which in the historical world are scattered all over concrete duration and extension and half-absorbed in the irrational chaos of experience. It offers thus for each practical task a large choice of ready models, easily accessible and easily understood in their reciprocal rational connections. Precisely because scientific idealization of practical reality does not follow the pre-existing real order, but takes its own object-matter, practically simple or practically complicated, without regard to the practical system to which it belongs, and puts it into connection with others with which it never was connected practically, scientific ideas when used in planning make an unlimited number of new practical combinations possible. By their scientific meaning which they obtain while being theoretically connected with other ideas, they suggest to the practical worker such possibilities of reshaping and intercombining given practical objects and practical systems as the already existing practical organization of
(335) reality could never suggest. The practical organization left alone would tend to a perfect stability, to an exclusion of all imprevisible change as antirational. But when it begins to use theoretic ideas as its object-matter, it finds there a rational order completely different from its own and yet bearing upon its own, which allows it to produce new types of organization, by their very appearance substituting themselves in active experience for the old types without, however, annihilating the systematic order of the latter which, once constructed, cannot cease to exist. Thus, not only the rationalization of any new practical system is incomparably more rapid, owing to the use of ideas, but the rapidity with which new systems appear increases in an enormous proportion with the growing application of theory to practice. Compare the record of technical inventions now and a thousand years ago, or the development of material technique with that of social technique.
But besides these well-known utilitarian consequences, the practical application of theoretic ideas has a less popularly emphasized but not less important effect in bringing step by step a progressive, though imperfect, practical realization of the theoretic orders in the empirical historical world. We have seen that the degree of reality which a theoretic order can acquire in being imposed upon empirical reality by theoretic thought cannot become very high as compared either with the old concrete complexes of historical objects or with the highly real instrumental organization of practical systems. When, however, a theoretic generalization of things, situations, schemes, established on the ground of their uniformity, becomes the foundation of a practical reflective tendency to treat in the future these things, situations, schemes, as uniform in various practical systems, then the theoretic class is something more, besides being a product and a ground of scientific reflection: it is a constitutive element of some practical scheme. When further a theoretic system of ideas becomes
(336) practically used to establish repeatedly between objects, situations, schemes of various classes, such connections as exist between their ideas, the system is something more than a theory: it is also a constitutive part of some practical dogma. In this way, the theoretic order becomes imposed upon the world by practice with the help of practical instruments. This imposition is indeed fragmentary and proceeds not from the higher theoretic generalizations down to particular concepts and ideas, but from particular ideas and concepts of a very limited complexity up to those more comprehensive generalizations which practical life at a given stage of its development can already use for planning. It is impossible to study this evolution thoroughly without going into much historical detail; but its significance will be sufficiently suggested by a few considerations.
On the ground of practical organization alone there is no reason why, for instance, in an industrial system the technical schemes should be treated as belonging more closely together than the economic or legal schemes actually used and without which the continual working of the given system of industry would be as impossible as without proper technical methods. Furthermore, from the practical standpoint there certainly is no original connection whatever between the technical schemes used in different industries and in various countries. But science creates the concept of a purely material reality to which economic and legal schemes as such do not belong, and scientific theories of material reality are used as instruments for practical planning. This brings with it the creation of new practical connections. The scientific methodological conception of one material reality subjected to one order, a conception developed in the details of scientific research and systematization, becomes the ground of a practical tendency to treat various technical schemes as bearing upon the same domain of reality, and therefore as interconnected with each other more closely than with
(337) economic or legal schemes, independently of the actual organization of particular, empirically given, industrial systems. The idea of one material technique arises as an expression of this tendency; there is a new practical dogma more or less clearly formulated and resulting in the establishment of innumerable practical connections between the technical organizations of various industries, in various countries, under various economic conditions; technique slowly becomes practically, not only theoretically, one domain; and reality as object-matter of technique becomes also in some measure one material world from the practical standpoint.
Furthermore, the possibility of practically substituting in some cases purely technical schemes for a combination of technical and social schemes, that is, of introducing machine work instead of human work, generalized by the growing application of science and theoretically founded on the conception of the methodological unity and formal homogeneity of physical nature, leads to a conscious practical tendency, manifesting itself all through technical life: the tendency to substitute everywhere machine work for human work and to exclude almost entirely social schemes from industrial activities. A parallel tendency working in the social field, at this moment rather inadequately expressed in the socialistic ideal, permits us to foresee a gradual practical separation of problems concerning control of nature from those concerning control of society. Such a separation, in so far as effected, will realize in practice the theoretic distinction of the physical from the social order, and result in a deeper and deeper systematic practical organization of the former in accordance with the postulates of physical science.
Similar examples are found in the sphere of personal life. Psychological reflection, when applied to the solution of practical personal problem, produces a rationalization of personal experiences completely different from their original practical organization; see, for instance, the practical influence
(338) of ancient stoical and epicurean doctrines. Perhaps the most striking case of practical realization of a theoretic order is the fact that the very concept of psychological consciousness as of a distinct domain of reality has been so generally accepted as a practical dogma and has such a high degree of reality that philosophical reflection may show its relativity without being able to counterbalance its influence on practical life. However, in this case we have certainly to discount the rôle of religious factors.
It is evident, in general, that only a long empirical investigation can show to what a degree in any given domain theoretic thought has succeeded not only in superimposing its order over the practical organization of reality as a purely "mental" systematization of experience, but also in imposing, though only fragmentarily, its order upon the results of practical activity by having its ideas and systems realized as components of practical systems and with the help of practical instruments. But, whether more or less far-reaching, the realization of the theoretic order in practice is possible only because of the fact that fragments of this order—ideas and systems of ideas—are the object-matter of practical activity, are isolated from their ideal content, incorporated into dynamic practical systems and used by practical reflection for practical purposes as instruments of planning. In the same way, as we have seen, the idealization of the practical organization of reality is possible only because fragments of this organization—objects and systems of objects—are the object-matter of theoretic activity, are isolated from their real content and incorporated into theoretic systems. The relation between the theoretic and the practical rationality of the world is strictly reciprocal. Each influences the other, but only by being passively used as instrument or as material for the other's construction and development.
