Part 10 (2/2)

According to the preceding exposition, the current psychological doctrine of focus and margin is an attempt to reduce the changes in the stimulus to terms of static ent.i.ties denominated sensations and images.

By abstracting from change we convert the new stimulus that is already on the way into inert sensory material, which lends itself to purely a.n.a.lytic treatment. In this way the suggested hardness of the rock becomes a ”centrally aroused sensation” of a stubbed toe, the heat of the candle becomes an image of a burn, etc. As was said before, the sensations are not existences, but representatives or symbols of our nascent activities; they are the static equivalents of this foreshadowing or reference to the future. The explanation of experience that we find in James and Bergson approximates this view so closely in one respect and departs from it so widely in another as to warrant a brief discussion.

A prominent characteristic of the doctrine advocated by James and Bergson is the emphasis given to the foreshadowings or antic.i.p.ations of the future. Experiences of conflict, such as the struggle to recall a name, take on their peculiar coloring, so these writers contend, from their relations.h.i.+p to a beyond, to something which is yet to be. If we are to understand experience as it really is, we must guard against the besetting temptation to translate everything into spatial equivalents.

This forward reference is usually read off as a distinction and contrast between simultaneously existing components. Some const.i.tuent is first set apart as the nucleus or focus and is then enveloped with an elusive, intangible wraith of meaning, which is called the margin. We have been taught to think of the focus as made up of sensory material of some sort and silhouetted against a background lit up by the fitful, inconsequential heat-lightning of meaning. But this is a perversion of the facts. When we are engaged in a problem it is precisely these unformed meanings that are of interest and importance. They are in the focus of consciousness, in so far as we can speak of a focus at all.

They absorb our attention and direct our energies. They inform us of a margin, not by refusing to compete for our attention with more important or more interesting facts, but by bodying forth the _unfinished_ character of the situation. Hence this beckoning, this tingling with the sense of closeness, this sinking back when our efforts meet with defeat.

Focus and margin, in short, have to do with movement, with transition, and not with a static field. These situations are felt as inherently unstable and in process of reconstruction. There is a peculiar sense of activity, of ”something doing,” of a future knocking on the door of the present. What is thus on its way to the present we can designate only in terms of the object as it is after it has arrived. To call it marginal is to immerse the object in this temporal flux, which embodies perfectly the characteristics of Bergsonian duration.

But this is only a first step. If we turn now to those experiences from which this inner diremption of fact and meaning is absent, we find a process that is essentially the same in kind. They likewise const.i.tute a temporal flow, even though there be no sense of duration or of change as such. The different moments of these experiences are not mechanically juxtaposed, but blend together in much the same way as when the process is experienced as a process. In principle we have the same transition, the same becoming, the same growth from less to more, the same activity of continuous reconstruction. Conscious life, we find, is a continuous adjustment; each of its moments is a ”transitive state.” The more evenly flowing experiences are likewise endowed with a focus and margin, not in the form of static elements, but as a dynamic relations.h.i.+p of what is with what is to be.

Such an interpretation of experience, moreover, opens the way for a proper valuation of the psychologist's procedure. The concept of sensation is methodology pure and simple. Granted that focus and margin are such as was indicated a moment ago, how are they to be described, unless we resort to some _Hilfsbegriff_ such as sensations? James's description of the effort to recall a forgotten name is not description at all in a scientific sense, since the ”wraith of the name” that we are trying to recover is of too unearthly a fabric to be weighed and measured by accepted scientific standards. It makes us ”tingle,” it lets us ”sink back,” but such portrayal is literature rather than science.

Our first step must be to resolve our material into components. These components we identify with genuine elements if we can, with pious fictions if we must; but until this is done there can be no exact description. There can be no precision in our statement of the facts and no formulation of the laws that govern their changes.

This view undeniably has a certain plausibility. As long as the results are attained which the psychologist sets out to reach, we need not be hypersensitive on the score of methods. In the field of natural science, at all events, this Jesuitical principle is not incompatible with respectability. If it be true, however, that sensation is but a tool or artifact, a means to an end, what is the end that is to be attained by this device? It is at this point that we come to the parting of the ways. According to the view previously elaborated, the antic.i.p.ations of the future have to do with the results of our possible acts, and sensations are simply symbols for the various elements in our complex motor responses. In the case of Bergson and James, however, the clue that is furnished by response is discarded. The reference to the future, being dissociated from behavior, is taken as evidence of an abstract or metaphysical duration, so that experience is somehow other than it seems; and sensation is regarded as the translation of duration into the language of s.p.a.ce. a.s.sociationism is justified in its belief that reality is different from its appearance in our experience, but is criticized for attempting to interpret the real in terms of s.p.a.ce rather than time. In both cases the lead of the subject-matter is abandoned in favor of an explanation that is derived from a fourth-dimensional plane of existence.

The suspicion that these two positions have a deep-seated affinity is strengthened if we call to mind that the concept of sensation was originated, not in the interests of methodology, but as the expression of a historic preconception that mistook fiction for fact. The fundamental error back of it was the preposterous notion that consciousness consists of subconscious or unconscious const.i.tuents, which by their mechanical or chemical combinations make our experience what it is. The question which it raises and which has afflicted us even to the present day is not primarily the question of fact, but the question of intelligibility, as the controversy over mindstuff abundantly attests. Whether we regard experience as made up of sensory material, however, or as const.i.tuted in a Bergsonian fas.h.i.+on, is a matter of detail; the primary question is whether a distinction between consciousness as it appears and as it ”really” is has any meaning. In so far as this distinction is maintained, we are beating the thin air of mythology, despite our reinterpretations and justifications. True conversion does not consist in a renaming of old G.o.ds, but demands a humble and a contrite heart. To call sensation an artifact, a methodological device, without a surrender of the metaphysical a.s.sumption that lies back of a.s.sociationism is not to correct the evil, but is more likely to be treated as an indulgence for sins that are yet to be committed.

This fundamental ident.i.ty is presumably the reason for certain other similarities, which would perhaps not be readily antic.i.p.ated. Both doctrines undertake to tell us what is going on behind the scenes, what consciousness or experience ”really” is. The descriptions present an astonis.h.i.+ng difference of vocabulary, but if we take care not to be misled by superficial differences, we find an equally astonis.h.i.+ng agreement as to content. From the one side consciousness is explained as a juxtaposition of elements; from the other as an interpenetration of elements so complete that the parts can be neither isolated nor distinguished from the whole. On the one hand we find a multiplicity without unity, on the other a unity without multiplicity. In the one account the temporal unit is a sensation devoid of internal temporal diversity; in the other duration as such is a unity in which past, present, and future blend into an undifferentiated whole. The one position gathers its facts by a mystifying process called introspection; the other obtains its results from a mystical faculty of intuition. The difference in language remains, but both accounts lead us away into a twilight region where words subst.i.tute themselves for facts.

As was suggested a moment ago, the contrast between ordinary experience and something else of which it is the appearance is the result of the failure to give proper recognition to the facts of behavior. If we connect the forward reference of experience with the operations of our nascent activities, we have no need of a pure duration or of bridging the gulf between reality and its appearances. In the same way, if we construe sensations as just symbols of our responses, we rid ourselves of problems that are insoluble because they are unintelligible. Such problems const.i.tute metaphysics in the bad sense of the word, whether they show themselves in the domain of science or of philosophy. To describe experience by reference to such a real is to explain what we know in terms of what we do not know. The question what is real is absolutely sterile. Our descriptions and explanations must remain on the same plane as the experiences with which they deal, and not seek after a real of a different order. If we are to have an explanation of consciousness at all, the explanation must not take us back to hypothetical sensations that are almost but not quite experienced, nor to a duration in which all distinctions are swallowed up, but must be rendered in terms of other facts that dwell in the light of common day.

By way of conclusion I venture to urge once more that a proper consideration of the facts of behavior will furnish us with a key that will unlock many a door. The conception of stimulus and response gives us a differentia for experience and also enables us to distinguish within experience between consciousness and object. If, however, we disregard behavior, we are bound to lose our way. The distinction between the experienced and the unexperienced is either wiped out or else is permitted to convert itself into a distinction between appearance and reality that leads nowhere and explains nothing. The significance of truth as the successful guidance of behavior, in accordance with the program laid down in the organization of stimulus and response, is lost to sight and recourse is had to a fourth-dimensional truth or reality for the miracle of breathing life into the dead bones of our philosophic abstractions. The study of behavior const.i.tutes a mode of approach that holds out the hope of deliverance from questions that should never have been asked. We are on a different and, let us hope, a higher level when we cease to ask how consciousness can lay hold of pa.s.sive objects, or how knowledge _uberhaupt_ is possible, and concern ourselves rather with the wondrous activity whereby this plastic dance of circ.u.mstance that we call the universe transcends the domain of mechanism and embodies itself in the values of conscious life.

THE PHASES OF THE ECONOMIC INTEREST

HENRY WALDGRAVE STUART

-- 1. In the logic of Instrumentalism, truth has been identified with usefulness and the good with the satisfactory. Cla.s.sifying critics have seen in this the damaging mark of Utilitarianism, certain of them deeming ”Amerikanismus” an even shrewder and more specific diagnosis.

The a.s.sociation of these terms together and the aptness of either to express what the critics have in mind are matters of small interest. It is of more importance to discover, behind the reproach implied, the a.s.sumptions which may have made the reproach seem pertinent. One cannot, of course, suppose it to express a sheer general aversion to the useful or an ascetic abhorrence of all satisfaction on principle. Puritanism, aestheticism, and pedantry should be last resorts in any search for an interpretative clue.

The distrust of Utilitarianism need be ascribed to none of these. It comes instead from a conception of the true Utilitarian as a dull and dogmatic being with no interests beyond the range of his own uninquiring vision, no aspiration beyond the complacent survey of his own perfections and no standards beyond the inventory of his own _bourgeois_ tastes and prejudices. The type is indeed not yet extinct in our day: but is it plausible to charge a ”new” philosophy with conspiring to perpetuate it? Is Instrumentalism only philistinism called by a more descriptive name? It professes at least to be a logic of hypothesis and experiment, whereas for the perfect philistine there are no ultimate problems and hence no logic but the logic of self-evidence. When Instrumentalism speaks of needs and interests in its a.n.a.lysis of truth and goodness does it then mean the needs and interests that define the individual in what is sometimes invidiously termed a ”biological”

sense--interests that control him before his conduct becomes in any way a problem for himself? Quite as a matter of course, just this has been the a.s.sumption. The satisfactoriness of prompt and cogent cla.s.sification has had a hand in the vindication of truth's supremacy over satisfaction. In the view of instrumentalism this ready interpretation of its meaning is nothing less than the thinking of the unthinkable and the bodying-forth of what is not. The man who has solved a problem simply _is_ not the man he was before--if his problem was a genuine one and it was he who solved it. He cannot measure and judge the outcome by his earlier demands for the very good reason that the outcome of real deliberation empties these earlier demands of their interest and authority for him.

Can the conception thus suggested of personal growth through exercise of creative or constructive intelligence be in any measure verified by a general survey of the economic side of life? Has it any important bearings upon any parts of economic theory? These are the questions to which this essay is addressed.

I

-- 2. How have the real or fancied needs of the average person of today come to be what they are? For all sorts and conditions of men, the ways and means of living have, during the past century or two--even during the past decade or two--undergone revolutionary changes. It is true that many of these changes have been relatively superficial, touching only certain externalities and entering in no important way into life's underlying and dominant motives. Others, no doubt, may fairly be held to confuse and disperse the energies of men, instead of making for wholeness, sanity and development of human interest and power. And critics of industrial and social progress who have felt the need for reservations of this sort fall easily into a certain mood of historic homesickness for the supposed ”simplicity” of an earlier age. But our interest, in this discussion, is in the genesis, the actual process of becoming, of our present ”standards of living,” not their value as rated by any critical (or uncritical) standard. And accordingly we shall take it for a fact that on the whole the average person of today is reasonably, perhaps unreasonably, well satisfied with his telephone, his typewriter, and his motor-car; with his swift and easy journeyings over land and sea; with his increasingly scientific medical attendance and public sanitation; with his virtually free supplies of literature and information, new and old, and with his electric light or his midnight oil (triple distilled) to aid in the perusal. More than this, he is so well satisfied with all these modern inventions that, historical or aesthetical or other ”holidays” apart, he would never for a moment dispense with any one of them as a matter of free choice. Grossly material and humbly instrumental though they are, these things and their like const.i.tute the framework sustaining the whole system of spiritual functions that make up the life we live today, as a society and as individuals. And our present problem simply is the way in which they were first received by those who were to use them, and pa.s.sed into their present common acceptance. To put the matter in general terms, how is it that novel means of action or enjoyment, despite their novelty, are able to command fair scrutiny and hearing and can contrive to make their way, often very speedily, into a position of importance for industry and life?

There is an easy and not unnatural way of thinking of this process as we see it going on about us that may keep us long unmindful of even the possibility of such a question. In every field of action, we habitually look back upon accomplished changes from some present well-secured vantage-point, and as we trace the steps by which they have come to pa.s.s it is almost inevitable that we should first see the sequence as an approach, direct or devious but always sure, to the stage on which we happen to have taken our stand. It seems clear to us that what we have attained is better than aught that has gone before--if it were not distinctly satisfactory on its own merits we should not now be taking it as the standpoint for a survey. But once it is so taken, our recognition of its appreciable and satisfying superiority pa.s.ses over insensibly into metaphysics. What we now find good we find ourselves perceiving to have been all the while predestined in the eternal scheme of things! We pause in retrospect like the wayfarer who has reached the turning of a mountain road or the man of middle age who for the first time feels that his professional position is a.s.sured. This, we say, justifies the effort it has cost, _this_ at last is really living! And the next step in retrospective reconstruction follows easily; this was my true goal from the first, the dim and inexpressible hope of which would not let me pause and kept me until now dissatisfied. The end was present in the beginning, provoking the first groping efforts and affording progressively the test and measure by which their results were found ever wanting.

This retrospective logic may explain the presence and perennial charm of those panoramic pages in our encyclopaedias purporting to show forth the gradual perfecting of great instrumentalities upon which our modern life depends. We survey the ”evolution” of printing, for example, from the wooden blocks of the Chinese or of Laurens Coster down to the Hoe press, the stereotype plate, and the linotype machine. Or we see the forms of written record from pictured papyrus, cuneiform brick, and ma.n.u.script scroll down to the printed book and the typewritten page; the means of carriage by land from the ox-cart of the patriarchs to the stage-coach, the Cannonball Limited, the motor-truck, and the twelve-cylinder touring-car. And as one contemplates these cheerfully colored exhibits there is in each case an almost irresistible suggestion of a constant and compelling need of ”universal man” seeking in more and more marvellously ingenious ways an adequate expression and satisfaction.

This need seems never to have lapsed or changed its nature. All along both driving power and direction, it has been the one fixed factor in a long process in which all else has been fluctuating, contingent, and imperfect--all else except the nature of the materials and the principles of mechanics, which, too, are seen in the end to have been mutely conspiring toward the result. Essential human nature, it seems clear, does not and happily cannot change. Spiritual progress, in this ultimate optimism, means simply clearer vision, completer knowledge, and a less petulant and self-a.s.sertive habit of insistence upon the details of particular purposes as individual ”impulse” and ”idiosyncrasy” define them. We fortunate beings of today have available, in the various departments of our life, certain instrumentalities, and to these our interests attach. These interests of ours in their proportional strength (so the argument runs) express our native and generic const.i.tution in so far as this const.i.tution has been able as yet to achieve outward expression and embodiment. And accordingly, in interpreting the long history of technological evolution, we take what we conceive ourselves now to be as normative and essential. We project back into the lives of primitive man, of our own racial ancestors, or of our grandfathers, the habits and requirements which we acknowledge in ourselves today and we conceive the men of the past to have been driven forward on the ways of progress by the identical discontent that would presumably beset ourselves if we were to be suddenly carried back to their scale and manner of existence.

<script>