NEW PHILOSOPHY CALLED PPAGMATISM 65 



as it refers to nothing in particular in the world of concrete values — it 

 follows that this logic will not meet the requirements of a scientific 

 method which is seeking to explain the actual world of phenomena 

 conditioned by human interests and purposes. 



Instrumentalism, in other words, is an attempt at once to make 

 philosophy scientific and science philosophic, and pragmatism means 

 instrumentalism in this sense. In seeking to work out this relation 

 in detail, pragmatism has become a general theory of experience, and, 

 interpreted in terms of existing schools of thought, may be described 

 as presenting both an empiricistic and an idealistic phase of its 

 methodology. 



In the first place, pragmatism is empiricistic. If philosophy is to 

 be practical and personal and instrumental it must begin with concrete 

 experience, not with an assumed reality beyond nor with an abstracted 

 aspect. It must begin with the full tide of life as we live it and try 

 to understand it from within, not seek to leap out of experience to 

 some transcendental vantage-ground from which the procession might 

 be watched from without. Nor will philosophy begin with such partial 

 aspects as mind and matter nor with such terminal problems as origin 

 and destiny, but will endeavor by a patient study of the way in which 

 experience goes on in the present moment of consciousness to construct 

 the law of the process by which it goes on in other moments. This is 

 the empircal principle of pragmatism. As Professor Dewey puts it, 

 Reality is what it is experienced as. Or as Hegel long since phrased 

 it, " the laws of thought are the laws of things." 



This empirical point of view has several important implications. 

 It implies, for one thing, that the distinction between experience and 

 reality is not an absolute one, not an ontological distinction, as the 

 metaphysicians say, but only a methodological or functional one. It 

 no more represents a distinctness in existence than does the distinction 

 of the how and the what of anything, or the distinction of process and 

 content. Experience regarded from the point of view of what it is, its 

 content, its filling of objects and events, we call reality. Reality, 

 regarded from the point of view of hoiv it goes on or the way in which 

 it occurs in consciousness, that is, viewed as a process of evolution 

 here and now, we call experience. A moment of consciousness is a 

 sample of how reality evolves. An object in space or an event in time 

 is a sample of the content of this evolving process. Reality viewed in 

 longitudinal section as a process gives us what we call experience. 

 Experience taken in cross-section yields a content which we call reality. 



In the second place, mind or consciousness is what it seems to be — a 

 transformation-phase of experience, not a separate entity. The dis- 

 tinction of mind and body and their alleged disparateness and supposed 

 parallelism is a pseudo-problem created by the methodological inutil- 



VOL. LXXIII. — 5. 



