Experimental Desires

The man in the street, when asked what he thinks about a certain matter, often replies that he does not think at all; he knows. The suggestion is that thinking is a case of active uncertainty set over against conviction or unquestioning assurance. When he adds that he does not have to think, but knows, the further implication is that thinking, when needed, leads to knowledge; that its purpose or object is to secure stable equilibrium.

It is the purpose of this paper to show some of the main stages through which thinking, understood in this way, actually passes in its attempt to reach its most effective working; that is, the maximum of reasonable certainty.

I wish to show how a variety of modes of thinking, easily recognizable in the progress of both the race and the individual, may be identified and arranged as successive species of the relationship which doubting bears to assurance; as various ratios, so to speak, which the vigor of doubting bears to mere acquiescence. The presumption is that the function of questioning is one which has continually grown in intensity and range, that doubt is continually chased back, and, being cornered, fights more desperately, and thus clears the ground more thoroughly. Its successive stations or arrests constitute stages of thinking. Or to change the metaphor, just in the degree that what has been accepted as fact-the object of assurance-loses stable equilibrium, the tension involved in the questioning attitude increases, until a readjustment gives a new and less easily shaken equilibrium.

The natural tendency of man is not to press home a doubt, but to cut inquiry as short as possible. The practical man's impatience with theory has become a proverb; it expresses just the feeling that, since the thinking process is of use only in substituting certainty for doubt, any apparent prolongation of it is useless speculation, wasting time and diverting the mind from important issues. To follow the line of least resistance is to cut short the stay in the sphere of doubts and suggestions, and to make the speediest return into the world where one can act. The result, of course, is that difficulties are evaded or surmounted rather than really disposed of. Hence, in spite of the opposition of the would-be practical man, the needs of practice, of economy, and of efficiency have themselves compelled a continual deepening of doubt and widening of the area of investigation.

It is within this evolution that we have to find our stages of thinking. The initial stage is where the doubt is hardly endured but not entertained; it is no welcome guest but an intruder, to be got rid of as speedily as possible. Development of alternative and competitive suggestions, the forming of suppositions (of ideas), goes but a little way. The mind seizes upon the nearest or most convenient instrument of dismissing doubt and reattaining security. At the other end is the definitive and conscious search for problems, and the development of elaborate and systematized methods of investigation-the industry and technique of science. Between these limits come processes which have started out upon the path of doubt and inquiry, and then halted by the way.

In the first stage of the journey, beliefs are treated as something fixed and static. To those who are using them they are simply another kind of fact. They are used to settle doubts, but the doubts are treated as arising quite outside the ideas themselves. Nothing is further from recognition than that ideas themselves are open to doubt, or need criticism and revision. Indeed, the one who uses static meanings is not even aware that they originated and have been elaborated for the sake of dealing with conflicts and problems. The ideas are just "there," and they may be used like any providential dispensation to help men out of the troubles into which they have fallen.

Words are generally held responsible for this fixation of the idea, for this substantiation of it into a kind of thing. A long line of critics has made us familiar with the invincible habit "of supposing that wherever there is a name there is some reality corresponding to it"; of supposing that general and abstract words have their equivalent objects somewhere in rerum natura, as have also singular and proper names. We know with what simplicity of self-confidence the English empirical school has accounted for the ontological speculation of Plato. Words tend to fix intellectual contents, and give them a certain air of independence and individuality. That some truth is here expressed there can be no question. Indeed, the attitude of mind of which we are speaking is well illustrated in the person who goes to the dictionary in order to settle some problem in morals, politics, or science; who would end some discussion regarding a material point by learning what meaning is attached to terms by the dictionary as authority. The question is taken as lying outside of the sphere of science or intellectual inquiry, since the meaning of the word-the idea-is unquestionable and fixed.

But this petrifying influence of words is after all only a superficial explanation. There must be some meaning present or the word could not fix it; there must be something which accounts for the disposition to use names as a medium of fossilization. There is, in truth, a certain real fact-an existent reality-behind both the word and the meaning it stands for. This reality is social usage. The person who consults a dictionary is getting an established fact when he turns there for the definition of a term. He finds the sense in which the word is currently used. Social customs are no less real than physical events. It is not possible to dispose of this fact of common usage by reference to mere convention, or any other arbitrary device. A form of social usage is no more an express invention than any other social institution. It embodies the permanent attitude, the habit taken toward certain recurring difficulties or problems in experience. Ideas, or meanings fixed in terms, show the scheme of values which the community uses in appraising matters that need consideration and which are indeterminate or unassured. They are held up as standards for all its members to follow. Here is the solution of the paradox. The fixed or static idea is a fact expressing an established social attitude, a custom. It is not merely verbal, because it denotes a force which operates, as all customs do, in controlling particular cases. But since it marks a mode of interpretation, a scheme for assigning values, a way of dealing with doubtful cases, it falls within the sphere of ideas. Or, coming to the life of the individual, the fixed meaning represents, not a state of consciousness fixed by a name, but a recognition of a habitual way of belief: a habit of understanding.

We find an apt illustration of fixed ideas in the rules prevalent in primitive communities, rules which minutely determine all acts in which the community as a whole is felt to have an interest. These rules are facts because they express customs, and carry with them certain sanctions. Their meaning does not cease with judicial utterance. They are made valid at once in a practical way against anyone who departs from them. Yet as rules they are ideas, for they express general ways of defining doubtful matters in experience and of re-establishing certainty. An individual may fail in acknowledgment of them and explicit reference is then necessary. For one who has lost himself in the notion that ideas are psychical and subjective, I know of no better way to appreciate the significance of an idea than to consider that a social rule of judgment is nothing but a certain way of viewing or interpreting facts; as such it is an idea.

The point that is of special interest to us here, however, is that these ideas are taken as fixed and unquestionable, and that the cases to which they are to apply are regarded as in themselves equally fixed. So far as concerns the attitude of those who employ this sort of ideas, the doubt is simply as to what idea should be in a particular case. Even the Athenian Greeks, for instance, long kept up the form of indicting and trying a tree or implement through which some individual had been killed. There was a rule-a fixed idea-for dealing with all who offended against the community by destroying one of its citizens. The fact that an inanimate object, a thing without intention or volition, offended was not a material circumstance. It made no difference in the case; that is, there was no doubt as to the nature of the fact. It was as fixed as was the rule.

With advance in the complexity of life, however, rules accumulate, and discrimination-that is, a certain degree of inquiring and critical attitude-enters in. Inquiry takes effect, however, in seeking among a collection of fixed ideas just the one to be used, rather than in directing suspicion against any rule or idea as such, or in an attempt to discover or constitute a new one. It is hardly necessary to refer to the development of casuistry, or to the multiplication of distinctions within dogmas, or to the growth of ceremonial law in cumbrous detail, to indicate what the outcome of this logical stage is likely to be. The essential thing is that doubt and inquiry are directed neither at the nature of the intrinsic fact itself, nor at the value of the idea as such, but simply at the manner in which one is attached to the other. Thinking falls outside both fact and idea, and into the sphere of their external connection. It is still a fiction of judicial procedure that there is already in existence some custom or law under which every possible dispute-that is, every doubtful or unassured case-falls, and that the judge only declares which law is applicable in the particular case. This point of view has tremendously affected the theory of logic in its historic development.

One of the chief, perhaps the most important, instrumentalities in developing and maintaining fixed ideas is the need of instruction and the way in which it is given. If ideas were called into play only when doubtful cases actually arise, they could not help retaining a certain amount of vitality and flexibility; but the community always instructs its new members as to its way of disposing of these cases before they present themselves. Ideas are proffered, in other words, separated from present doubt and remote from application, in order to escape future difficulties and the need of any thinking. In primitive communities this is the main purport of instruction, and it remains such to a very considerable degree. There is a prejudgment rather than judgment proper. When the community uses its resources to fix certain ideas in the mind-that is, certain ways of interpreting and regarding experience-ideas are necessarily formulated so as to assume a rigid and independent form. They are doubly removed from the sphere of doubt. The attitude is uncritical and dogmatic in the extreme-so much so that one might question whether it is to be properly designated as a stage of thinking.

In this form ideas become the chief instruments of social conservation. Judicial decision and penal correction are restricted and ineffective methods of maintaining social institutions unchanged, compared with instilling in advance uniform ideas-fixed modes of appraising all social questions and issues. These set ideas thus become the embodiment of the values which any group has realized and intends to perpetuate. The fixation supports them against dissipation through attrition of circumstance, and against destruction through hostile attack. It would be interesting to follow out the ways in which such values are put under the protection of the gods and of religious rites, or themselves erected into quasi-divinities-as among the Romans. This, however, would hardly add anything to the logic of the discussion, although it would indicate the importance attached to the fixation of ideas, and the thoroughgoing character of the means used to secure immobilization.

The conserving value of the dogmatic attitude, the point of view which takes ideas as fixed, is not to be ignored. When society has no methods of science for protecting and perpetuating its achieved values, there is practically no other resort than such crystallization. Moreover, with any possible scientific progress, some equivalent of the fixed idea must remain. The nearer we get to the needs of action the greater absoluteness must attach to ideas. The necessities of action do not await our convenience. Emergencies continually present themselves where the fixity required for successful activity cannot be attained through the medium of investigation. The alternative to vacillation, confusion, and futility of action is importation to ideas of a positive and secured character, not in strict logic belonging to them. It is this sort of determination that Hegel seems to have in mind in what he terms Verstand-the understanding. "Apart from Verstand," he says, "there is no fixity or accuracy in the region either of theory or practice"; and, again, "Verstand sticks to fixity of characters and their distinctions from one another; it treats every meaning as having a subsistence of its own." In technical terminology, also, this is what is meant by "positing" ideas-hardening meanings.

In recognizing, however, that fixation of intellectual content is a precondition of effective action, we must not overlook the modification that comes with the advance of thinking into more critical forms. At the outset fixity is taken as the rightful possession of the ideas themselves; it belongs to them and is their "essence." As the scientific spirit develops, we see that it is we who lend fixity to the ideas, and that this loan is for a purpose to which the meaning of the ideas is accommodated. Fixity ceases to be a matter of intrinsic structure of ideas, and becomes an affair of security in using them. Hence the important thing is the way in which we fix the idea-the manner of the inquiry which results in definition. We take the idea as if it were fixed, in order to secure the necessary stability of action. The crisis past, the idea drops its borrowed investiture, and reappears as surmise.

When we substitute for ideas as uniform rules by which to decide doubtful cases that making over of ideas which is requisite to make them fit, the quality of thought alters. We may fairly say that we have come into another stage. The idea is now regarded as essentially subject to change, as a manufactured article needing to be made ready for use. To determine the conditions of this transition lies beyond my purpose, since I have in mind only a descriptive setting forth of the periods through which, as a matter of fact, thought has passed in the development of the inquiry function, without raising the problem of its "why" and "how." At this point we shall not do more than note that, as the scheduled stock of fixed ideas grows larger, their application to specific questions becomes more difficult, prolonged, and roundabout. There has to be a definite hunting for the specific idea which is appropriate; there has to be comparison of it with other ideas. This comes to involve a certain amount of mutual compromise and modification before selection is possible. The idea thus gets somewhat shaken. It has to be made over so that it may harmonize with other ideas possessing equal worth. Often the very accumulation of fixed ideas commands this reconstruction. The dead weight of the material becomes so great that it cannot sustain itself without a readjustment of the center of gravity. Simplification and systematization are required, and these call for reflection. Critical cases come up in which the fiction of an idea or rule already in existence cannot be maintained. It is impossible to conceal that old ideas have to be radically modified before the situation can be dealt with. The friction of circumstance melts away their congealed fixity. Judgment becomes legislative.

Seeking illustrations at large, we find this change typified in Hebrew history in the growing importance of the prophet over the judge, in the transition from a justification of conduct through bringing particular cases into conformity with existent laws, into that effected by personal right-mindedness enabling the individual to see the law in each case for himself. Profoundly as this changed conception of the relation between law and particular case affected moral life, it did not, among Semites, directly influence the logical sphere. With the Greeks, however, we find a continuous and marked departure from positive declaration of custom. We have assemblies meeting to discuss and dispute, and finally, upon the basis of the considerations thus brought to view, to decide. The man of counsel is set side by side with the man of deed. Odysseus was much experienced, not only because he knew the customs and ways of old, but even more because from the richness of his experience he could make the pregnant suggestion to meet the new crisis. It is hardly too much to say that it was the emphasis put by the Greek mind upon discussion-at first as preliminary to decision, and afterward to legislation-which generated logical theory.

Discussion is thus an apt name for this attitude of thought. It is bringing various beliefs together; shaking one against another and tearing down their rigidity. It is conversation of thoughts; it is dialogue-the mother of dialectic in more than the etymological sense. No process is more recurrent in history than the transfer of operations carried on between different persons into the arena of the individual's own consciousness. The discussion which at first took place by bringing ideas from different persons into contact, by introducing them into the forum of competition, and by subjecting them to critical comparison and selective decision, finally became a habit of the individual with himself. He became a miniature social assemblage, in which pros and cons were brought into play struggling for the mastery-for final conclusion. In some such way we conceive reflection to be born.

It is evident that discussion, the agitation of ideas, if judged from the standpoint of the older fixed ideas, is a destructive process. Ideas are not only shaken together and apart, they are so shaken in themselves that their whole validity becomes doubtful. Mind, and not merely beliefs, becomes uncertain. The attempt to harmonize different ideas means that in themselves they are discrepant. The search for a conclusion means that accepted ideas are only points of view, and hence personal affairs. Needless to say it was the Sophists who emphasized and generalized this negative aspect-this presupposition of loss of assurance, of inconsistency, of "subjectivity." They took it as applying not only to this, that, and the other idea, but to ideas as ideas. Since ideas are no longer fixed contents, they are just expressions of an individual's way of thinking. Lacking inherent value, they merely express the interests that induce the individual to look this way rather than that. They are made by the individual's point of view, and hence will be unmade if he can be led to change his point of view. Where all was fixity, now all is instability: where all was certitude, nothing now exists save opinion based on prejudice, interest, or arbitrary choice.

The modern point of view, while condemning sophistry, yet often agrees with it in limiting the reflective attitude as such to self-involution and self-conceit. From Bacon down, the appeal is to observation, to attention to facts, to concern with the external world. The sole genuine guaranty of truth is taken to be appeal to facts, and thinking as such is something different. If reflection is not considered to be merely variable matter, it is considered to be at least an endless mulling over of things. It is the futile attempt to spin truth out of inner consciousness. It is introspection, and theorizing, and mere speculation.

Such wholesale depreciation ignores the value inherent even in the most subjective reflection, for it takes the settled estate which is proof that thought is not needed, or that it has done its work, as if it supplied the standard for the occasions in which problems are hard upon us, and doubt is rife. It takes the conditions which come about after and because we have thought to measure the conditions which call out thinking. Whenever we really need to reflect, we cannot appeal directly to the "fact," for the adequate reason that the stimulus to thinking arises just because "facts" have slipped away from us. The fallacy is neatly committed by Mill in his discussion of Whewell's account of the need of mental conception or hypothesis in "colligating" facts. He insists that the conception is "obtained" from the "facts" in which "it exists," is "impressed upon us from without," and also that it is the "darkness and confusion" of the facts that make us want the conception in order to create "light and order."[46]

Reflection involves running over various ideas, sorting them out, comparing one with another, trying to get one which will unite in itself the strength of two, searching for new points of view, developing new suggestions; guessing, suggesting, selecting, and rejecting. The greater the problem, and the greater the shock of doubt and resultant confusion and uncertainty, the more prolonged and more necessary is the process of "mere thinking." It is a more obvious phase of biology than of physics, of sociology than of chemistry; but it persists in established sciences. If we take even a mathematical proposition, not after it has been demonstrated-and is thus capable of statement in adequate logical form-but while in process of discovery and proof, the operation of this subjective phase is manifest, so much so, indeed, that a distinguished modern mathematician has said that the paths which the mathematical inquirer traverses in any new field are more akin to those of the experimentalist, and even to those of the poet and artist, than to those of the Euclidean geometer.

What makes the essential difference between modern research and the reflection of, say, the Greeks, is not the absence of "mere thinking," but the presence of conditions for testing its results; the elaborate system of checks and balances found in the technique of modern experimentation. The thinking process does not now go on endlessly in terms of itself, but seeks outlet through reference to particular experiences. It is tested by this reference; not, however, as if a theory could be tested by directly comparing it with facts-an obvious impossibility-but through use in facilitating commerce with facts. It is tested as glasses are tested; things are looked at through the medium of specific meanings to see if thereby they assume a more orderly and clearer aspect, if they are less blurred and obscure.

The reaction of the Socratic school against the Sophistic may serve to illustrate the third stage of thinking. This movement was not interested in the de facto shaking of received ideas and a discrediting of all thinking. It was concerned rather with the virtual appeal to a common denominator involved in bringing different ideas into relation with one another. In their comparison and mutual modification it saw evidence of the operation of a standard permanent meaning passing judgment upon their conflict, and revealing a common principle and standard of reference. It dealt not with the shaking and dissolution, but with a comprehensive permanent Idea finally to emerge. Controversy and discussion among different individuals may result in extending doubt, manifesting the incoherency of accepted ideas, and so throwing an individual into an attitude of distrust. But it also involves an appeal to a single thought to be accepted by both parties, thus putting an end to the dispute. This appeal to a higher court, this possibility of attaining a total and abiding intellectual object, which should bring into relief the agreeing elements in contending thoughts, and banish the incompatible factors, animated the Socratic search for the concept, the elaboration of the Platonic hierarchy of Ideas in which the higher substantiate the lower, and the Aristotelian exposition of the systematized methods by which general truths may be employed to prove propositions otherwise doubtful. At least, this historic development will serve to illustrate what is involved in the transition from the second to the third stage; the transformation of discussion into reasoning, of subjective reflection into method of proof.

Discussion, whether with ourselves or others, goes on by suggestion of clues, as the uppermost object of interest opens a way here or there. It is discursive and haphazard. This gives it the devious tendency indicated in Plato's remark that it needs to be tied to the post of reason. It needs, that is, to have the ground or basis of its various component statements brought to consciousness in such a way as to define the exact value of each. The Socratic contention is the need of compelling the common denominator, the common subject, underlying the diversity of views to exhibit itself. It alone gives a sure standard by which the claims of all assertions may be measured. Until this need is met, discussion is a self-deceiving play with unjudged, unexamined matters, which, confused and shifting, impose themselves upon us.

We are familiar enough with the theory that the Socratic universal, the Platonic idea, was generated by an ignorant transformation of psychological abstractions into self-existent entities. To insist upon this as the key to the Socratic logic is mere caricature. The objectivity of the universal stood for the sense of something decisive and controlling in all reflection, which otherwise is just manipulation of personal prejudices. This sense is as active in modern science as it was in the Platonic dialectic. What Socrates felt was the opinionated, conceited quality of the terms used in the moral and political discussion of his day, as that contrasted with the subject-matter, which, if rightly grasped, would put an end to mere views and argumentations.

By Aristotle's time the interest was not so much in the existence of standards of decision in cases of doubt and dispute as in the technique of their use. The judge was firmly seated on the bench. The parties in controversy recognized his jurisdiction, and their respective claims were submitted for adjudicature. The need was for rules of procedure by which the judge might, in an obvious and impartial way, bring the recognized universal or decisive law to bear upon particular matters. Hence the elaboration of those rules of evidence, those canons of demonstrative force, which are the backbone of the Aristotelian logic. There was a code by which to decide upon the admissibility and value of proffered testimony-the rules of the syllogism. The figures and terms of the syllogism provided a scheme for deciding upon the exact bearing of every statement propounded. The plan of arrangement of major and minor premises, of major, minor, and middle terms, furnished a manifesto of the exact procedure to be followed in determining the probative force of each element in reasoning. The judge knew what testimony to permit, when and how it should be introduced, how it could be impeached or have its competence lessened, and how the evidence was to be arranged so that a summary would also be an exhibit of its value in establishing a conclusion.