CHAPTER XV

THE EXPERIENCE OF TRUTH

§ 60. The man of science and the man of culture. § 61. "Mere ideas" and the picture-psychology. § 62. "Mere feelings." § 63. Science and anthropomorphic prejudice. § 64. Truth and satisfied imagination. § 65. Error and lack of imagination. § 66. Experience of reality vs. coherence and correspondence.

I

MPORTANT among the moral questions as here conceived is the question, What is truth? In the answers commonly given it seems that truth is an impersonal relation a relation of coherence among our ideas, for one view; for the other a relation of correspondence between ideas and facts. For these views it seems that truth is not a moral question-rather perhaps an "intellectual" question. I may then distinguish the moral question by asking, What is the experience of truth?

But this will compel us to ask, What is the experience of "ideas"? And of "feelings"? And for the purpose of stating all of these questions I will suggest the following situation.

§ 60

Let us suppose that we have before us, in a college catalogue, the long list of courses constituting a modern curriculum. Half of the courses bear titles that are more or less unintelligible, each of them is to be identified in the end only by its number. The catalogue does not thus far seem to be very lively reading or at first glance very significant. Yet a moment's reflection will tell us that what lies here listed before us is the greater part of the many and various developments or expressions of the human spirit.

And what the curriculum would represent if it could, is a tout ensemble of reflective human life.

If we now go a step further we shall find that by common consent these studies are divided roughly into two classes, known respectively as the sciences and the humanities; or as scientific studies and culture studies. Typical scientific studies are physics, chemistry, and biology. Typical culture studies are languages with their literatures-in a word, literary criticism; but also art and art criticism; and properly also (though not often found in the college curriculum) music and musical criticism. But to these we should add the study of philosophy, so far at least as philosophy includes moral philosophy, the philosophy of beauty, or the philosophy of religion. And thus we find on the one side science; on the other literature and poetry, art, music, morality, religion. On the one side (let us say for the moment) knowledge; on the other, taste, feeling, and insight. It seems, then, that in the distinction of science and culture we have two worlds of discourse. By Royce they are named the world of description and the world of appreciation. By others the world of facts and the world of values. Having in mind the foregoing chapter I prefer to call them here the world of fact and the world of imagination.

What, then, is the difference? Putting this question to a professor of science, he will probably answer as follows. All of these studies, he may admit, stand for operations of the human spirit. Science no less than the other studies has a human history. But in science-and in science alone -the spirit does more than operate; it operates upon something. It grasps something which is other than itself. In other words, science is knowledge of reality. In these other fields of the spirit all that happens is a movement of the spirit within itself; a movement which at best yields pleasing images, ideas, or feelings-objectively, fiction. The not too developed scientific conscience may tolerate these diversions of the spirit as a kind of justifiable relief from the strain of scientific thought. The more resolute scientist

condemns them in his heart as a sinful waste of time, and if unrestrained by the academic amenities he would probably explain that the proper place for a professor of literature is not in a university but in a sanatorium.1

In a word, then, the world of science is a revelation of truth and reality; the world of imagination (as I prefer to call the other world) is a world of mere ideas and mere feelings.

The attitude of the professor of literature towards the professor of science is probably no less supercilious (in his heart-for he too is restrained by the academic amenities), though in these days less confident. For him, however, I suspect that the scientist is no better than a carpenter or a clever machinist. The professor of literature feels that he himself has a grasp of something which the scientist has missed, and the scientist is then set down as "lacking in finer spiritual insight". Insight into what? Well, at any rate, insight into human nature. In other words, science is not the only knowledge; criticism is also knowledge, knowledge indeed of human nature and human life. There is nothing in the whole range of literature, poetry, art, religion, which is not such knowledge. But it seems that more than this is involved. It is hardly a satisfying theory of poetry to say that poets are occupied in describing to one another their personal states of mind. Rather, it would be said, their insight; insight into a reality which may be variously described as a realm of ideas, a world of imagination, a spiritual world including and also transcending the human world. The professor of literature, I say, is somewhat less confident to-day than the professor of science, but at bottom we may suppose him to be cherishing the conviction (vital, it would seem, for any critical justification of his profession) that his world of imagination is somehow not less objectively real-rather it is more truly real than

1 To those who suspect me of exaggeration I will say that such is precisely the kind of recommendation made by a philosopher, an unbending exponent of the scientific point of view, for the benefit of those who differed with him, at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association not half a dozen years ago.

the scientist's world of fact. If so there are no "mere ideas"

And so, Are there "mere ideas"? Such, it seems to me, is the deeper question involved in any issue of knowledge and truth. And the question includes the other question, Are there "mere feelings"? I shall meet the question by proposing the following disjunction: either the ideas (or feelings) in question are an insight into reality—into a reality which, like the reality which science claims to reveal, is other than ourselves or they are no "ideas" whatever, but bare words or other vehicles of expression.

§ 61

No one, I will venture to say, has ever experienced a mere idea. Modern philosophy, following Descartes' Cogito, ergo sum, has been full of the notion that, while we may doubt the existence of the things to which our ideas refer, we can never doubt the existence of the ideas themselves; and its ever-recurring scepticism has been, How can we assert the existence of anything except mere ideas? And yet if I ask you what is a chair you will easily tell me, but if I ask you what is an idea of a chair, and how it differs from a chair, you will be at a loss to reply. It seems that these most certain entities are the hardest to locate or describe.

Regarded as an entity, an idea is no more to be found in human experience than the atom of physical science. As a matter of experience we may say that the idea of a tree is one among the other aspects of our experience of the tree. It is that aspect which is suggested by such adjectives as "clearness", "distinctness", "familiarity". The physical or "real "tree is of course neither more nor less "distinct", neither more nor less "familiar". When, however, I speak of an idea of a tree as a duplicate of the real tree I am resorting to a metaphor for the purpose of adjusting certain difficulties presented by a comparison of your experience of the tree with mine. When I myself see a tree what I see

is just a tree; not any idea of a tree. But when I observe your seeing a tree-and most of what I observe is that you look at it-then I have to wonder how you can see the tree, at least the tree that I see. For that tree is thirty feet high, and how it can get through your eye, and your smaller optic nerve, and so on, is more than I can understand. Moreover, you sometimes claim to see a tree when for me there is no tree there. To settle these difficulties (rather than to explain them), I find it convenient to assume that what you directly perceive is not the tree but a symbol, or representative, of the tree-something like a picture, a banknote, a baggage-check, or a poker-chip, the function of which is to represent. Upon this assumption rest the theory of representative perception and the correspondence-theory, or copy-theory, of truth.

Among the possible representative metaphors the picture is the nearly universal choice. It is hardly too much to say that for common sense and for science alike the idea is just a picture-qualified, however, as a "mental picture" or a "mental image". Upon this metaphorical basis is built most of the traditional psychology, especially that which makes a special claim to be "empirical", to communicate the facts of mind just as they are. This view, which makes of human life a gallery of pictures exhibited in succession, has been stigmatized by Bergson as the "cinematograph-psychology"; a comparison so apt in detail that we might almost conceive the cinema to have been invented for the purpose of objectifying the traditional view of mind. The synthesis of a succession of instantaneous pictures into an experience of motion illustrates precisely, when the process is reversed, the method by which for two centuries past psychologists have "analysed" all of the life of the soul into coexistences and successions of atomic "mental states". As an explanatory metaphor, however, even the simple picture has a unique advantage. For it seems to us that pictures represent their object necessarily and inevitably. Their representative function is not a matter of convention as in the case of a poker-chip or baggage-check.