Process and Reality — the Gifford Lectures, 1929

o metaphysical system can hope entirely to satisfy these pragmatic tests. At the best such a system will remain only an approximation to the general truths which are sought. In particular, there are no precisely stated axiomatic certainties from which to start. There is not even the language in which to frame them. The only possible procedure is to start from verbal expressions which, when taken by themselves with the current meaning of their words, are ill-defined and ambiguous. These are not premises to be immediately reasoned from apart from elucidation by further discussion; they are endeavours to state general principles which will be exemplified in the subsequent description of the facts of experience. This subsequent elaboration should elucidate the meanings to be assigned to the words and phrases employed. Such meanings are incapable of accurate apprehension apart from a correspondingly accurate apprehension of the metaphysical background which thep. 20 universe provides for them. But_no_ language can be anything but elliptical, requiring a 128 of the imagination to understand itS meaning in its relevance to 1mmediate experience. The position of metaphysics in the development of culture cannot be Tn eree without pemnembering that no verbal statement is the adequate expression of a propositio a old sabe metaphysical system gains a false air of adequate precision from the fact that its words and phrases have passed into current literature. Thus propositions expressed in its language are more easily correlated to our flitting intuitions into metaphysical truth. When we trust these verbal statements and argue as though they adequately analysed meaning, we are led into difficulties which take the shape of negations of what in practice is presupposed. But when they are proposed as first principles they assume an unmerited air of sober obviousness. Their defect is that the true propositions which they do express lose their fundamental character when subjected to adequate expression. For example consider the type of propositions such as ‘The grass is green,’ and “The whale is big.’ This subjectpredicate form of statement seems so simple, leading straight to a metaphysical first principle; and yet in these examples it conceals such complex, diverse meanings.

SECTION VI

It has been an objection to speculative philosophy that it is overambitious. Rationalism, it is admitted, is the method by which advance is made within the limits of particular sciences. It is, however, held that this limited success must not encourage attempts to frame ambitious schemes expressive of the general nature of things.

One alleged justification of this criticism is ill-success: European thought is represented as littered with metaphysical systems, abandoned and unreconciled.

Such an assertion tacitly fastens upon philosophy the old dogmatic test. The same criterion would fasten illSewOWwE ATIVE PHEELOSOPH Y 21-success upon science. We no more retain the physics of the seventeenth century than we do the Cartesian philosophy of that century. Yet within limits, both systems express important truths. Also we are beginning to understand the wider categories which define their limits of correct application. Of course, in that century, dogmatic views held sway; so that the validity both of the physical notions, and of the Cartesian notions, was misconceived. Mankind never quite knows what it is after, When we survey the history of thought, and likewise the history of practice, we find that one idea after another is tried out, its limitations defined, and its core of truth elicited. In application to the instinct for the intellectual adventures demanded by particular epochs, there is much truth in Augustine’s rhetorical phrase, Securus judicat orbis terrarum. At the very least, men do what they can in the way of systematization, and in the event achieve something. ‘The proper test is not that of finality, but of rogress. ale

But the main objection, dating from the sixteenth century and receiving final expression from Francis Bacon, is the uselessness of philosophic speculation. The position taken by this objection is that we ought to describe detailed matter of fact, and elicit the laws with a generality strictly limited to the systematization of these described details. General interpretation, it is held, has no bearing upon this procedure; and thus any system of general interpretation, be it true or false, remains intrinsically barren. Unfortunately for this objection, there are no brute, self-contained matters of fact, capable of being understood apart from interpretation as an element in a system. Whenever-we attempt to express the matter of immediate experience, we find that its understandin Teads us beyond itself, to its contemporaries, to_its past, to 1ts future, and to the universals in terms of which its defhiniteness 1s exhibited. But such universals, by their very character of universality, embody the potentialit of other facts with variant types of definiteness. Thus

p. 22

the understanding of the immediate brute fact requires its metaphysical interpretation_as_an item In a wor with some systematic relation to it. When thought comes _ hought comes upon the scene, it finds the interpretations as matters of practice. Philosophy does not initiate interpretations. Tis search for a rationalistic scheme is the search_for more adequate criticism, and for more adequate Justification, of the interpretations which we perforce_employ, Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and_success in the enterprise of interpretation. If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography. Every scientific memoir in its record of the ‘facts’ is shot through and through with interpretation. The methodology of rational interpretation is the product of the fitful vagueness of consciousness. Elements which shine with immediate distinctness, in some circumstances, retire into penumbral shadow in other circumstances, and into black darkness on other occasions. And yet all occasions proclaim themselves as actualities within the flux of a solid world, demanding a unity of interpretation.

Philosophy_is the self-correction by consciousness of sion contri ] stances of its origin additional ti epening i wn peculiar individuality. Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies. An actual individual, of s i rade, has truck with the totality of thin reason of its sheer actuality; but it has attained its individual depth of being by a selective emphasis limited to its own purposes. e task of philosophy is to recover. the totality obscured by the selection. It replaces in rational experience what has been su bmerged in the higher sensitive experience and has been sunk yet deeper by the initial operations of consciousness tee The selective- — ness of individual experience is moral so far as it conp. 23forms to the balance of importance disclosed in the rational vision; and conversely the conversion of the intellectual insight into an emotional force corrects the sensitive experience in the direction of morality. The correction is in proportion to the rationality of the insight.

Morality of outlook is inseparably conjoined with generality of outlook. The antithesis between the general good and the individual interest can be abolished only when the individual is such that its interest is the general good, thus exemplifying the loss of the minor intensities in order to find them again with finer composition in a wider sweep of interest.