6 COMMON SENSE (aND SCIENCE) 



. . . each moment of experience becomes consequential and pro- 

 phetic of the rest. The calm places in life are filled with power and its 

 spasms with resource. 



Instinct in the animal has behind it a deep elemental drive— and 

 well it may, for on it depends the survival of the organism and its 

 species. As the control of action by instinct gives way to control by 

 common sense, the latter assumes immense responsibilities, and thus 

 becomes the focus of acute anxieties. In both animal and human 

 subjects, systematic frustration of reasonable expectations produces 

 neurotic disturbances. Such disturbances may be provoked even by 

 exposure to circumstances that seem unreasonably to deny the cher- 

 ished possibility of finding in past experience pointers toward the 

 future. For example, Hebb notes that: 



Pavlov . . . taught the dog that food would be given following the 

 sight of one object, and not following that of another. No punishment 

 was given if the dog failed to discriminate between them. The objects 

 were made more and more alike until, after several days of failing to 

 discriminate, the dog's behavior changed, suddenly. Instead of com- 

 ing eagerly to the experimental room the dog struggled to avoid it; 

 instead of standing quietly in the apparatus, waiting for the next 

 signal to appear, he struggled and howled. 



The deep-seated drive so displayed is presumably carried over into 

 the active purposeftilness of the science which, whenever it succeeds 

 in descrying an order in past experience, makes us master of a futvue 

 shorn of its terrors precisely in the degree that it can be fettered by 

 chains of predictions. 



The Organization of Experience 



The individual's experience is varied and chaotic: how can he pos- 

 sibly give it a systematic order? The individual's experience is of 

 certain particular situations of the past: how can he possibly ex- 

 trapolate from them to inevitably non-identical situations of the 

 present (and future)? The individual's experience is personal, sub- 

 jective: how can he possibly arrive at the body of common sense 

 shared by all? To facilitate discussion of these, and other, questions, 

 I shall consider the organization of experience as a sequence of 

 "stages"; but I would emphasize at the outset that these are not pro- 



