about is but a reformulation of a meaningless problem,—how things-in-themselves can be known.

The path of evolutionary doctrine is abandoned in the treatment of sense-experience, which is only relatively pure, as if it were absolutely so, and thus radically different from conceptual experience. It is not true to say of any sensation that it is just an experience in which facts come and are. The fixity and determinateness of the things of sense-experience is after all only the comparative fixity of any product of evolution. If we ask the pragmatist himself how the original pure experience of the babe or of the race comes to be transformed into such an experience as ours, his answer is that a simon pure experience can have no survival value. Sentience has developed only in so far as the pure experience has been broken up and become cognitive. Consciousness in us tends to persist and extend because "the tendency of raw experience to extinguish the experient himself is lessened just in the degree in which the elements in it that have a practical bearing upon life are analyzed out of the continuum and verbally fixed and coupled together, so that we may know what is in the wind for us and get ready to react in time." The diversified character of our purest sense-experience is thus attributable in an indefinite degree to the work of past thought (using 'thought' in its broadest sense). There is, then, on the pragmatist's own showing, no chasm between a perceptualized and a conceptualized experience. And if the difference between them is only one of degree, why should he so urgently maintain that the criteria of truth and falsity are utterly inapplicable to sense-experience? Surely the reality of sense-experience must be correlative with its truth. To affirm reality of it at large has no significance. Everything is real in some sense. It is relevant to predicate 1eality of any thing, or even quality, in sense-experience, only if we mean that it is really the sort of thing, or the specific quality, we have perceived it as; and the perceiving or taking it as of any sort or species is always a true or false way of taking it.

10p. cit., p. 350.

We suspect that pure experience, like a good many other philosophical 'realities,' is an arbitrary construct, devised to stop up the loop-holes of a theory. It is everything and nothing at once; and as it cannot be brought into evidence who shall say its author nay? It is as like observed sensations as you please; and why not, since they contain the largest proportion of it? And it is as unlike them as you please; and why not, since, after all, they are merely conceptualized products? It is "not yet any definite what," perhaps because to be definite is to be brought under a concept; but it is "ready to be all sorts of whats,” for if reality were not what would be? It is "full both of oneness and manyness," to the eternal confusion of all rationalistic dialectic; but the "respects" in which it is one and many “don't appear." It is "changing throughout," so that change is as little mysterious as the one and the many; but it changes "so confusedly that its phases interpenetrate and no points, either of distinction or of identity, can be caught." This is all very convenient, but hardly convincing. Mr. James does not like historical parallels; but we cannot help thinking of the much abused substance of Spinoza, which while being one and indivisible contains an endless multiplicity, and while incapable of change or of the emotional perception of change, loves itself with an infinite intellectual love.

1Op. cit., p. 348.

APPENDIX II

THE PRACTICAL CHARACTER OF REALITY1

Recent discussions of the practical character of reality seem very significant when one considers their bearing on the relation between what are probably the two most distinctive doctrines of pragmatism. The first of these doctrines may be called instrumentalism; the second is immediatism. By instrumentalism is meant that element of pragmatism which has grown out of the application of the evolutionary method to logical problems. The evolutionary method in general prescribes that, in order to understand the existing nature of anything, we inquire into its origin and development, and that this development be in every case explained as an adjustment to the specific conditions under which it has taken place. When this method is applied to logic, it means, in the first place, that thought itself has arisen as a mode of organic adjustment to environment, and that its whole development has been, and is, determined with reference to this function. In the second place, and more particularly, instrumentalism means that all distinctions and terms of thought, that is to say, all meanings, are relative to the specific conditions which have called them forth and to the functions which they perform. This carries with it a denial of absolutism in all its historic forms, from the Platonic doctrine of the absolute good to the neo-Hegelian conception of reality as completely organized experience.

It is from the standpoint of instrumentalism that the pragmatist has so effectively sought to discredit the venerable disciplines of ontology and epistemology, whose aim is the investigation of reality as such or knowing as such. As profitably, argues the pragmatist, might we discuss with the pre-Kantian rationalist the nature of man as such, without reference to his biological relations to lower species and the conditions of his development 1Reprinted from the PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW, Vol. XVIII, No. 4, July, 1909.

from them. In place of epistemology, that outworn relic of rationalism, he would substitute a genetic investigation of the relation of thinking to other modes of experiencing, together with an inquiry into the specific conditions under which the various thought-processes arise and subside. The absolutist's condemnation of such procedure as 'merely psychological' he would stigmatize as parallel to the vitalist's contempt for the chemical investigation of organic processes as 'merely mechanical.' The claim, that psychological investigation is essentially and ultimately incapable of throwing light on the nature of meaning, is, he would urge, as unfounded as the claim that vital reactions are in essence not amenable to chemical analysis.

A very similar conclusion regarding the investigation of the nature of reality we might suppose to be the natural expression of the instrumentalist attitude toward ontology. We might suppose, for example, the pragmatist pointing out the dualism in which absolutistic philosophy has generally issued, as a result of the attempt to define reality in existential (as distinct from functional) terms. Such a dualism, he might say, is practically inevitable; for the characterization of one form, or even aspect, of being as real thereby implies the unreality of other forms or aspects, and makes inexplicable the relation between the two divisions. The dualism may, perhaps, be avoided, but only by the expedient of maintaining that all being is real, in which case the term 'real' loses all significance. From the instrumentalist standpoint, the inquiry, What is reality? appears as futile as did the question, What is the cause of the world? to Kant. And we may imagine the pragmatist to urge of reality, even as Kant did of causality, that it is a conception applicable to the particular objects of experience in relation to each other, but utterly barren if applied to existence as a whole. But the advocate of instrumentalism would go farther than Kant. Something like this, perhaps, is the argument we may conceive him to advance. If one asks the cause of a given event, a complete answer would include the description of the whole preceding state of the uni

verse. On the other hand, the attempt to give a perfectly accurate account of the event itself would equally involve a description of the contemporaneous state of the universe. Completeness of statement in either case means the entire loss of all significance. No event is left and no cause can be adduced. How much, then, of the preceding state of the universe is to be regarded as the sufficient cause of any event? What degree of completeness does 'truth' demand? The only answer is: So much as is relevant to the purposes of the particular inquiry in hand. In fine, what may be regarded as a true account of the event, and what as an adequate description of its cause, is relative to the purposes of the investigation,—it is a 'practical' matter. The case is similar in regard to reality. What any object or event really is, always depends on the context and occasion in connection with which the object or event is considered. Taken 'at large,'-to use Professor Dewey's phrase, the inquiry is futile because indeterminate. The 'real,' again, is always such by distinction from the 'unreal,' or the 'apparent,' or even the 'ideal.' The ground for the distinction is always specific, and is to be found in the particular circumstances and exigencies which have given rise to it. The only general theory of reality (as of causality) must be functional; that is, it must be an account of the general service which the distinction 'real-unreal' performs in our actual processes of thought. Such, in brief, is the position which we might suppose the pragmatist to take, and something of this sort we might suppose him to mean when he speaks of the 'practical character of reality.'

Let us now turn to what has been mentioned as the second distinctive doctrine of pragmatism, namely, immediatism. In the following discussion I shall, for purposes of brevity, confine myself to a consideration of immediatism as it appears in Professor Dewey's writings. In this matter he seems to be in substantial agreement with other leading exponents of pragmatism, notably Professor James1; and if the thesis which is here to be

We have pointed out in the preceding Appendix that this is not strictly true.