248 DOGMATISM AND EVOLUTION 



thing known. Thus it is only the object known that is experienced 

 as real. The paradoxical character of the doctrine that know 

 ing changes reality is now apparent. For if we experience the 

 real only as the outcome of the knowing experience, it surely 

 cannot be the real that is changed by the process of knowing. 



But there is another sense in which the immediatist doctrine 

 shows itself to be paradoxical. As conceived by the immediatist, 

 the object known, the outcome of the knowing-experience, is the 

 earlier experienced reality transformed in a certain specific way. 

 It is emphatically not a different reality. The object known is 

 essentially the same thing that was experienced in the initial 

 stage of the process. The whole purpose of the knowing is just 

 to effect a specific change in the thing experienced. It may, in 

 fact, be described as a specific sort of transformation taking place 

 in things. The significance of describing reality as practical lies 

 in the refusal to regard the real nature of things as something to 

 be distinguished from our personal subjective attitudes toward 

 them. And it is this same refusal which likewise gives point to 

 the assertion, that things are what they are experienced as. For 

 they are experienced as standing in personal, practical relations 

 to us, as means, ends, obstacles, dangers, delights. In other 

 words, as things are experienced there is no distinction between 

 the merely subjective and the objective itself, between our per 

 sonal attitude and the thing experienced. In Professor Dewey s 

 words, the thing experienced is just the experience itself. How, 

 then, it seems pertinent to ask, does this distinction of sub 

 jective and objective arise? Is it a purposeless device of sheer 

 intellectualism? Or, on the contrary, is it not the very purpose 

 of the knowing-experience to make just this distinction? Is not 

 knowing evoked for the sake of determining what in the initial 

 experience is to be regarded as objective and what as merely 

 personal and subjective? And does not the outcome of the 

 knowing-experience, the object known, include and preserve just 

 that part of the content of the earlier experience which has been 

 determined as objective? And, contrariwise, is not that part of 



