a living or sympathetic acquaintance" with things, distinguished from the knowledge about them that "touches only the outer surface of reality." "The only way in which to apprehend reality's thickness is either to experience it directly by being a part of reality one's self, or to evoke it in imagination by sympathetically divining some one else's inner life." If you are to really "know reality," you must "dive back into the flux itself," or "turn your face toward sensation, that fleshbound thing which rationalism has always loaded with abuse."1 Dewey's opinion would seem to differ from that of Bergson and James, mainly in his strict reservation of the term 'knowledge' for the intellectualized experience. The nonintellectual experience is there in his view as in that of Bergson and James, and it plays substantially the same rôle. "Things are what they are experienced to be"; and knowledge is by no means the "only genuine mode of experiencing." The "knowledge-object" is immersed in "an inclusive, vital, direct experience." There is an “experience in which knowledge-and-its-object is sustained, and whose schematized, or structural, portion it is." Knowing being one mode of experiencing, "the primary philosophic demand [from the standpoint of immediatism] is to find out what sort of an experience knowing is — or, concretely, how things are experienced when they are experienced as known things."2 In short, this extra-cognitive experience is clearly an experience of things to be, an experience of things as such and such; and thus a revelation of their nature. As with Bergson and James, it affords the light by which the cognitive process itself is circumspected and discounted, and intellectualism denounced as rendering a limited view of reality. §3. Thus far, then, the pragmatist polemic against intellectualism signifies that knowledge commonly so-called, 1 A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 249-252. "Reality as Experience," in Jour. of Phil., Psych., and Scientific Methods, Vol. III, p. 256; Influence of Darwin, etc., pp. 228, 229. Immediacy Knowledge the knowledge mediated by ideas, is but one way, and that not the most profound way, of knowing things. The essentially practical or instrumental character of mediate knowledge suggests that it is knowlMediate edge 'for a purpose,' a knowledge limited by a governing motive. The full extent and native quality of reality, including the ideational or mediating process itself, is to be apprehended only by immediacy, such as sensation or the feeling of life. We must now examine the grounds of this pragmatist contention. We must ask, in other words, why it is that intellectual knowledge is limited, inadequate, and secondary. In the first place, it is contended that mediation implies immediacy. The mediating relation between the idea and its object, always implies the immediate presence of the idea, of the process, and eventually of the object or terminus of the process. "It is in the concrete thing as experienced," says Dewey, "that all the grounds and clues to its own intellectual or logical rectification are contained." "Sensations," says James, "are the mother-earth, the anchorage, the stable rock, the first and last limits, the terminus a quo, and the terminus ad quem of the mind." Or, as he puts it more emphatically, "these percepts, these termini, these sensible things, these mere matters-of-acquaintance, are the only realities we ever directly know, and the whole history of our thought is the history of our substitution of one of them for another, and the reduction of the substitute to the status of a conceptual sign."1 Thus not only is mediate knowledge tested by immediacy, but it is never more than a second best, a mode of knowledge to be adopted in default of immediacy. The best idea will be that which renders its own existence unnecessary by leading to "an actual merging of ourselves with the object, to an utter mutual confluence and identification," "a completely consummated acquaintance." This follows 1 Dewey: op. cit., p. 235; James: Meaning of Truth, p. 39 (italics mine). James: op. cit., p. 156. from the function of ideas. Their virtue lies in their substitutional and provisional character. They are means of knowing beyond the limits of immediacy; but are valid there only in so far as they refer to possibilities of immediacy. It is not unfair to say that on anti-intellectualist grounds, reality is revealed only when it is actually or potentially present. Whether this be construed as a limiting of knowledge in general or only of one kind of knowledge in behalf of another, is a matter of words. Direct, presentative, immediate experience, in which reality is itself in mind, in which the knower and the known coincide, is more comprehensive, fundamental, and penetrating than the indirect, representative, mediate experience which implies it, refers to it, and is formed out of it. In examining further the grounds of the pragmatist indictment of intellectualism we come at once upon the question of concepts. Intellectualism is charged with a blind and excessive use of concepts, with an exclusive reliance on them despite the abstractness and artificiality which vitiate them. This indictment of concepts suggests their distinguishing marks. A concept is abstract in the sense of being a discrimination, separation, and fixation of some limited portion of a wider experience. Being the work of analysis, a concept is clear and distinct. A concept is unambiguous; once the identification has taken place the concept is just what it is identified as being, and can never be anything else. It is discrete and changeless, as distinguished from the unlimited richness, the marginal vagueness, and perpetual flux of sense and feeling. But these virtues are offset by its artificiality. A concept is an instrument, owing its existence and form to its use. As a human artifact it is other than, and in a sense false to, the primitive experience from which it is created and to which it is applied. In other words, a concept is an idea, in the pragmatist sense.1 To this disparagement of concepts as abstract and artificial we must now turn. 1 Whether all ideas are concepts is not clear; and for our immediate The Abstractness of Con § 4. James bases his criticism of concepts mainly on their abstractness. He repeatedly emphasizes their selective or partial character. This would not render them false if it were understood, and due cepts. "Vicious allowance made for it. But it is customary for Intellectualism" intellectualists to use concepts as though they were exhaustive of their objects, and to deny to the object whatever is not contained in the concept. This is what James calls "vicious" intellectualism or abstractionism. He describes it as follows: "We conceive a concrete situation by singling out some salient or important feature in it, and classing it under that; then, instead of adding to its previous characters all the positive consequences which the new way of conceiving it may bring, we proceed to use our concept privatively; we reduce the originally rich phenomenon to the naked suggestions of that name abstractly taken, treating it as a case of 'nothing but' that concept, and acting as if all the other characters from out of which the concept is abstracted were expunged." 1 In other words, "vicious intellectualism" proceeds as though a conceptual truth about a thing were the exclusive truth about the thing; whereas it is true only so far as it goes. Thus the world may be truly conceived as permanent and unified, since it is such in a certain respect. But this should not lead us, as it has led certain intellectualists, to suppose that the world is therefore not changing and plural. We must not identify our world with one conception of it. In its concrete richness it lends itself to many conceptions. And the same is true of the least thing in the world. It has many aspects, none of which is exhaustive of it. It may be taken in many relations or orders, and be given different names accordingly. As it is immediately presented it contains all these aspects, as potentialities for purpose it is not necessary to determine. See below, pp. 231–232. The best discussion of the matter is to be found in James: Some Problems of Philosophy, pp. 48 sq. 1 Meaning of Truth, p. 249 (italics mine); cf. ibid., p. 147; and Pluralistic Universe, p. 218. Cf. also below, p. 365. the discriminating and abstracting operation of thought. "Vicious intellectualism" thus rests on the errors that I have already referred to as 'exclusive particularity' and 'definition by initial predication': the false supposition that because a thing has one definable character, it cannot also have others; and that because it has been named first for one of its aspects, the others must be reduced to it or deduced from it.1 Now the fault of "vicious intellectualism" evidently lies in the misuse of concepts, and not in the nature of the concepts themselves. There is nothing to prevent our supposing that the abstractness of single concepts can be compensated for by the addition of further concepts, or by some conceptual system in which the presence and interrelation of many concepts is specifically provided for. In this case the remedy for the short-comings of concepts would be more concepts. But the indictment which pragmatism finds against intellectualism is much more serious than this. It is charged that concepts are such that they can never serve as means of knowing the native and salient characters of reality. To grasp these we must abandon concepts altogether, and turn to the illumination or inspiration of immediacy. To this charge, that there is an irremediable cognitive flaw in concepts, we must now turn. Concepts to § 5. Of eminent contemporary writers belonging to the pragmatist school in the broad sense, Bergson is the most radical 'anti-intellectualist.' 2 In his opinion The Failure of intellect not only divides and separates reality, thus replacing its concrete fulness with abstracted and partial aspects; but is doomed to failure, however far its activities may be Intellect cannot, in short, correct itself, and atone for its own short-comings. Radical Antiintellectualism carried. The cause of this irretrievable failure lies in the fact that 1 See above, pp. 126-128. • Although his view is expounded with evident approval by James, in A Pluralistic Universe, Lect. VI. |