Part 4 (2/2)
It subst.i.tutes for caprice the measuring of consequences, the detailed knowing of what we are about. That impartial judgment has its difficulties is clear from the simple fact alone that human beings start by being a bundle of instincts and soon grow into a bundle of habits. To the extent to which they can control these they are masters of themselves.
THE VALUE OF REFLECTION FOR LIFE. To many people there is something terrifying about the idea of controlling life by reason. Life (they point out correctly) is a vital process of instincts which appear before thinking, and which are often more powerful than reasoned judgments. Against advice to live consciously, to be in control of ourselves, to know what we are about, comes the call ”Back to Nature.” A life of reflection appears chilling and arbitrary. Because reflection so often reveals that impulses must be checked if disaster is not to result, it has come to be a.s.sociated with a metallic and Stoic repression. To many a persuasive impulse we must, after reflection, say, ”No.” Because of this a certain school of philosophers, poets, and radicals urges us to trust nature, to follow our impulses, which, being natural, must be right.
All of these rebels against reason make the mistake of supposing that the aim of reflective thinking is to quell instincts, which, with the best will in the world, it cannot succeed in doing. Instincts are present and powerful. In themselves they are neither worth encouraging, nor ought they to be repressed. The satisfaction of native desires _is_ what we want.
The importance of reflective thinking is precisely that it helps us to secure those satisfactions. To surrender to every random impulse or every habitual prompting is to have neither satisfaction nor freedom. Reflection might be compared to the traffic policeman at the junction of two crowded thoroughfares.
If everyone were to drive his car pell-mell through the rush, if pedestrians, street cars, and automobiles were not to abide by the rules, no one would get anywhere, and the result would be perpetual accident and collision. In thinking we simply control and direct our impulses in the light of the consequences we can foresee. To thus guide and control action makes us genuinely free.
If a man's actions are not guided by thoughtful conclusions, they are guided by inconsiderate impulse, unbalanced appet.i.te, caprice, or the circ.u.mstances of the moment. To cultivate unhindered, unreflective external activity is to foster enslavement, for it leaves the person at the mercy of appet.i.te, sense, and circ.u.mstance.[1]
[Footnote 1: Dewey: _How We Think_, p. 67.]
Instincts and habits are fixed responses; being placed in such and such circ.u.mstances we _must_ do such and such things.
Only when we can vary our actions in the light of our own thinking are we masters of our environment rather than mechanically controlled by it.
THE SOCIAL IMPORTANCE OF REFLECTIVE BEHAVIOR. Reflection in the life of the individual insures that he will not become the slave of his own habits. He will regard habits as methods to be followed when they produce good results, to be discarded or modified when they do not. But if habit in the life of the individual needs control lest it become dangerously controlling, it needs it more conspicuously still in the life of the group.
Unless the individuals that compose a society are alert and conscious of the bearings of their actions, they will be completely and mechanically controlled by the customs to which they have been exposed in the early periods of their lives.
What an individual regards as right or wrong, what he will cherish or champion in industry, government, and art, depends in large measure on his early education and training and on the opinions and beliefs of other people with whom he repeatedly comes in contact. A society may be democratic in its political form and still autocratic in fact if the majority of its citizens are merely machines which can be set off to respond in certain determinate ways to customary stimuli of names, leaders, and party slogans. A society becomes genuinely democratic, precisely to the extent to which there is on the part of its citizens partic.i.p.ation in the important decisions affecting all their lives. But the partic.i.p.ation will only be a formality if votes are decided and opinions formed on the basis of habit alone.
REFLECTION REMOVED FROM IMMEDIATE APPLICATION--SCIENCE.
Thus far thinking has been discussed in its more practical aspects. And thinking is in its origins a very practical matter.
Literally, most people think when they have to, and only when they have to. Given a problem, a difficulty, a maladjustment between the individual and his environment, thinking occurs. If every instinctive act brought satisfaction, thinking would be much less necessary and much less frequently practiced. This is ill.u.s.trated in the performance of any act that once required attention and discrimination, and has later become habitual. We do not think how to walk, eat, and spell familiar words, how to find our way about familiar streets or even in familiar dark rooms. We _do_ think about where we shall spend our evenings or our summer, which courses we shall choose at college, which profession we shall enter. Where we are uneasy, drawn by competing impulses, we consider alternatives, measure consequences, and choose our course of action in the light of the results we can forecast. But while a large proportion of reflective behavior is thus practical in its origins and its results, it also occurs not infrequently where there is no immediate problem to be solved. Not all of men's energies are concerned in purely practical concerns. And part of man's superfluous vitality is expended in disinterested and curious inquiry into problems whose solutions afford no immediate practical benefits, but in the mere solving of which man finds satisfaction.
From the dawn of history, when some man a little more curious than his fellows, a little less absorbed in the hunting, the food-getting, and the fighting which were in those early days man's chief imperative business, first began to observe the mysterious recurrences in the world about him, the rising and setting of the sun, the return of the seasons, the movements of the tides and the stars, there have been individuals born with a marked and sometimes a pa.s.sionate desire to observe Nature and to generalize their observations. They have noted that, given certain conditions, certain results follow. They observe that animals with given similarities of form and structure have certain identical ways of life, that some substances are malleable and others not, that dew appears at certain times in the day on certain objects and not on others. They have generalized from these; and we now call such generalizations law. These generalizations when gathered into a system const.i.tute a science.
The sciences started out with unconfirmed guesses based on not very accurate information. As man's methods became more precise, he controlled the conditions under which observations were made, and the conditions under which generalizations were drawn from them. The control of the conditions and methods of observation const.i.tute what is known as induction in science. To this phase of the reflective process belong all the instruments for precise observation which characterize the scientific laboratory. The control of the methods by which generalizations or theories are built up from these facts is also part of the logic of induction, and includes all the canons and regulations for inductive inference.
But generalizations once made must be tested, and the elaboration of these generalizations, the a.n.a.lysis of them into their precise bearings, const.i.tute that part of the process of reasoning known as deduction. The final verification is again inductive, an experimental corroboration of theories by the facts already at hand and by facts additionally sought out and observed.
(These processes will be discussed in detail in the chapter on ”Science and Scientific Method.”)
However complicated the process of inquiry may become, the sciences remain essentially man's mode of satisfying his disinterested curiosity about the world in which he is living.
Through the sciences man makes himself, as has been so often said, at home in the world. He subst.i.tutes for the ”blooming, buzzing confusion” which is the world as he first knows it, order, system, and law. Primitive man, absurd as seems to us his belief in a world of magic, of malicious demons and capricious G.o.ds, was trying to make sense out of the meaningless medley in which he seemed to find himself. Through science, modern man is likewise trying to make sense out of his world. The more apparently disconnected and incongruous facts that can be brought within the compa.s.s of simple and perfectly regular law, the less threatening or capricious seems the world in which we live. Where everything that happens is part of a system, we do not need, like the savage trembling in a thunderstorm, to be frightened at what will happen next. It is like moving in familiar surroundings among familiar people. Not all that goes on may be pleasant, but we can within limits predict what will happen, and are not puzzled and pained by continuous shocks and surprises.
We like order in the places in which we live, in our homes, in our cities, in the universe.
The sciences satisfy us not only in that they bring order into what at first seems the chaos of our surroundings, but in that they are themselves beautiful in their s.p.a.ciousness and their simplicity. We cannot pause here to consider the physiological facts which make us admire symmetry, but it is fundamental in our appreciation of music, poetry, and the plastic arts. From the sciences, likewise, we derive the satisfaction of symmetry on a magnificent scale. There is beauty as of a great symphony in the sweep and movement of the solar system. There is a quiet and infinite splendor about the changeless and comparatively simple structure which physics, in the broadest sense, reveals beneath the seeming multiplicity and variety of things. It is a desire for beauty as well as a thoroughgoing scientific pa.s.sion which prompts men like Poincare and Karl Pearson to seek for one law, one formula which, like ”one clear chord to reach the ears of G.o.d,”
expresses the whole universe.
THE PRACTICAL ASPECT OF SCIENCE. But while the origins of science may lie in man's thirst for system, simplicity, and beauty in the world, the tremendous advance of science has a more immediate and practical cause. To understand the laws of Nature means to have the power of prediction; it means to know that, given certain circ.u.mstances, certain others follow always and inevitably; it means to discover causes--and their effects. Man having attained through patient inquiry this capacity to tell in advance, may take advantage of it for his own good. The whole of modern industry with its phenomenal control of natural powers and resources is testimony to the use which man has found for the facts and laws which he would never have found out save for the curiosity which was his endowment and the inquiry which he made his habit. ”Knowledge is power,”
said Francis Bacon, and the three hundred years of science that have made possible the whole modern world of electric transportation, air travel between two continents, and instantaneous communication between remote parts of the world, have proved the aphorism. Man since his origin has tried to control his environment for his own good. The cave and the flint were his first rude attempts. In science with its accurate observation of facts not apparent to the unaided eye, and its discovery and demonstration of laws not found by casual and unsystematic common sense, man has an incomparably more refined instrument, and an incomparably more effective one. Thus, paradoxically enough, man's most disinterested and impartial activity is at the same time his most practical a.s.set.
THE CREATION OF BEAUTIFUL OBJECTS AND THE EXPRESSION OF IDEAS AND FEELINGS IN BEAUTIFUL FORM. Most men spend most of their lives necessarily in practical activity. Man's particular equipment of instincts survived in ”the struggle for existence”
precisely because they were practical, because they did help the human creature to maintain his equilibrium in a half-friendly, half-hostile environment. Man acquires also, as already has been pointed out, habits that are useful to him, that bring him satisfactions not attainable through the random instinctive responses which are his at birth. Reflection, too, is, for the most part, severely practical in its origins and its responsibilities. It guides action into economical and useful channels.
Most of man's actions are thus ways of modifying his environment for immediately practical purposes. Man has instincts and habits which enable him to live. But in making those changes in the world which enable him to live better, man, as it were by accident, makes them beautifully. Pottery begins, for example, as a practical art, but the skilled potter cannot help spending a little excess vitality and habitual skill in adding a quite unnecessarily graceful curve, a gratuitous decoration to the utilitarian vessel he is making.
In the words of Santayana, ”What had to be done was, by imaginative races, done imaginatively; what had to be spoken or made was spoken or made fitly, lovingly, beautifully....
The ceaseless experimentation and fermentation of ideas, in breeding what it had a propensity to breed, came sometimes on figments that gave it delightful pause.”[1]
[Footnote 1: Santayana: _Reason in Art_, p. 16.]
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