CHAPTER SIX

THE RESPONSES OF APPRECIATION VS. THE RESPONSES OF ACTION

THERE is not the slightest doubt that the variety of sensory qualities we have been considering, the colors and brightnesses the tones and noises, the tastes and temperatures and odors--not the slightest doubt that these different qualities exist as genuine ineradicable facts of human experience. Neither is there the least doubt that it is this wealth of different qualities which gives to objects such interest and value as they have for us.

But we have now to ask a further question, a question of critical importance to our inquiry. Does this range or variety of different qualities which we perceive in objects require

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for its explanation an objective order or system analogous to the order of physical events? In other words, do the different qualities which appear in a countless variety of blends and patterns imply a relation as objective and universal as that of physical causation? It was suggested at the close of the last chapter that the meaning and value of these qualitative differences may be the key to their objective correlation and organization.

The mere suggestion that we can find in the meaning and value of the things we perceive any clue to their order and organization as objective facts will arouse, in some quarters at least, the strongest objection. Granted that things get their meaning and value for us human beings from their qualitative likenesses and differences, what has this to do, it may be asked, with their own nature as parts of the real world? This objection, in the several forms which it assumes, requires

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answer if the case is not to be closed in advance against the line of thought we are pursuing.

In the first place, we may consider the view quite commonly held by enthusiasts for the methods of exact science that the different qualities which we perceive in the objects of, our environment represent nothing but the effects which objects have, by virtue of their primary or physical qualities, upon our human organism, in particular, of course, our sense organs and brain. These organic effects, it will be further said, are in real fact physico-chemical reactions, and thus all the variety of different qualities we observe turn out to be mere subjective appearances, existing in our human consciousness but having no place in the world of scientific fact. True it is that since the time of Newton this view has been widely accepted by scientists as an integral part of the scientific conception of the world, and so possessing the validity and certainty,

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of attested scientific truth. Thus supported it has gained wide credence and has seemed to many people to substantiate a materialistic interpretation of the world. But recent authoritative studies of the method and scope of the exact sciences have demonstrated that the view in question is no part of the established conclusions of physical science and that we are today justified in dismissing it as an unfounded philosophical theory grafted on to the growing body of scientific knowledge. Professor Whitehead attacks the theory because it destroys the unity of the natural world and therefore undermines the foundations of natural science itself. As he says, it “bifurcates” nature into two divisions, “namely into the nature apprehended in awareness and the nature which is the cause of that awareness. The nature which is the fact apprehended in awareness holds within it the greenness of the trees, the song of the birds, the warmth of

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the sun, the hardness of the chairs, the feel of the velvet. The nature which is the cause of the awareness is the conjectural system of molecules and electrons which so affects the mind as to produce the awareness of apparent nature.”¹ Professor E. A. Burtt also attacks this view in his recent study of the historical beginnings and development of the modem scientific world-view. “But when in the interest of clearing the field for exact mathematical analysis,” he writes, “men sweep out of the temporal and spatial realm all non-mathematical characteristics, concentrate them in a lobe of the brain, and pronounce them the semi-real effects of atomic motions outside, they have performed a rather radical piece of cosmic surgery which deserves to be carefully examined.”² And the result of his

1    Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, p. 30.
2    Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, p. 312.

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own examination, in agreement with that of Whitehead, is to show that when you have emptied the natural world of all except its geometrical and mechanical properties and then proceed to suppose these are the cause of our human sensations you have left on your hands unexplained the world of sensory appearance with its infinite variety of colors, sounds, temperatures, textures, and the rest, which is the sole empirical source of our knowledge of that other scientific order of mathematico-physical events. As Professor Hoernle forcibly puts it: “The theory of matter which we are criticizing may be described as the offspring of an unholy marriage between the old search for an ultimate substance and the new causal theory of colors, sounds, etc., as sensations produced in our minds. This twist of the theory makes out of the world actually perceived by our senses a subjective illusion and out of the material world

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which causes it, a doubtful guess.”³ We are abundantly justified, therefore, in rejecting the claim advanced in this first type of objection as a mistaken theory, false metaphysics instead of true science.

A second type of objection appeals to the authority of biology rather than physics and has more strength and plausibility than the first. While we must admit, it maintains, that the variety of different qualities we perceive in things is a genuine fact of our human con- sciousness, still these qualitative differences only signify the bearing which various objects of the environment have upon the vital well-being of our species, indicating the kinds of response which the human individual must make if he is to survive. Thus the qualities ,which make objects interesting and valuable really exist (as constituents of our human consciousness) and their value is a real fact

3    Hoernle, Matter, Life, Mind, and God, p. 75.

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(for us human beings). Hence while their value is a fact, it is a subjective fact, a fact of human psychology; it resides in the satisfactions which objects on account of their utility afford us rather than in the objects themselves. This objection is more weighty than the first and has a basis of scientific fact. Our sense organs and pathways of nervous transmission are the products of natural selection, and the qualities we discriminate and enjoy through them have unquestionable connection with the conditions of our organic well is a sign of its ripeness and ripeness means edibility, appeased hunger, and renewed strength. Thus a specific color, red or yellow, say, means “can eat,” “will nourish.” But not all the blends and patterns of colors and sounds and odors which we perceive and seek to experience and to enjoy have this direct bearing upon our biological well-being. Patterns of color and sound may

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be attended to and enjoyed for their own sake as beautiful. The aesthetic delight which a fruit cluster furnishes us may not be in the least diminished by knowledge that the fruit is poisonous.

But such truth as is contained in this second type of objection finds expression also in a third argument which is urged against the kind of interpretation proposed. Hence we can pass on at once to the last and most formidable of the objections we have to take into account. The different qualities which external objects present to our senses are, it is claimed, subjective because of being determined to some extent by the sense organs and powers of sensory discrimination and synthesis of the individual observer. Hence no constant and universally valid relations are possibly discoverable between objects as complexes of qualities; their relations in this aspect of their nature (which gives them value)

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are necessarily confused and shifting. in this respect they contrast unfavorably with the relations which hold among objects by virtue of their physical properties and which are found to be both constant and uniform when observed under experimental conditions at different times and by different observers.

It cannot be denied that there is an element of subjectivity in our perception of the various qualities possessed by existing objects, Sense-perceptions do differ with the sensory endowment of different individuals; the various degrees of color blindness and tone deafness are proof enough of that. It is also a fact that some individuals perceive harmonies of tone and color and form which are quite imperceptible to others. There is no doubt that the trained naturalist or practiced woodsman perceives much more in the forest or bush than is apparent to the average person and that much of what he does

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perceive in common with the latter he perceives quite differently. Of course it may be answered that in such cases as the last the actual sense-impressions are the same in both cases, the difference in what is perceived being entirely due to a difference in the associated ideas supplied by past experienced and accumulated knowledge. But such a reply, while largely true, merely brings to light a new difficulty--that in the aspect of existing objects we are considering, i.e., the complicated and changing patterns of diverse qualities they present, it is often quite impossible to distinguish what comes by the senses from what is contributed by imagination and memory.

These are serious objections, we must agree. How can we hope to reach an interpretation of the world which shall possess a validity as objective and universal as that of physical science when we start with data as subjective,

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shifting, and unreliable as these qualitative differences seem to be? Indeed we must acknowledge, I think, that the validity of such an interpretation of the real universe in terms of significance and value rather than of physical causation can be established only if two conditions are fulfilled. The first is that constant and uniform relations shall be discovered and experimentally verified between objects in their aspect of value, i.e., as blends and patterns of diverse qualities. The second is that these relations shall prove to be such as to organize existing objects into a coherent system through which the ideals of personal development and association obtain realization.

These conditions are, I believe, capable of fulfillment. Uniformities of relation between objects in their aspect of value are discovered by our responses of appreciation. There are three of these: I shall call them the responses

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of appreciative understanding, practical contrivance and invention, and aesthetic appreciation. They are all of them psycho-physical activities. Each one is a function of our organizing intelligence and each one has its own particular bodily expression. Appreciative understanding involves and depends on articulate speech, practical invention involves and depends on manual dexterity and contrivance, aesthetic perception involves and depends on sense-organ adjustments and emotionally expressive movements which (in the case of some individuals at least) lead on to artistic production.

These responses differ from that of action through which, as we have seen, the physical properties of objects are first brought to light and then (by measurement and experimentation) their laws of operation are defined and verified. But this difference should not be misunderstood. It is not that action consists

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in bodily movement while appreciation is a purely mental or spiritual activity. Both are psycho-physical activities; they are activities of intelligence and at the same time involve bodily movement. Action is the attempt of individual intelligence through bodily movement to bring about some change in the physical relationship of objects within its field of influence. Such changes may be brought about by bodily movements which merely alter the location of the agent relative to surrounding objects; or the agent may through movements of his own, initiate a series of changes in his physical environment. Appreciation is an effort to discover relations which exist among objects in virtue of their intrinsic and diverse qualities, relations which give them meaning and value. These relations., when apprehended or envisaged by in- telligence, are defined and actualized by motor responses confined to our own bodies

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and thus under our own control, such as those of language, of incipient manipulation, and of aesthetic-emotional expression.

Of course these two types of response, action and appreciation, are not two separate, powers or faculties which operate in independence of each other. We are prompted to act, and the course of our action is in a general way predetermined, by the attractiveness of the ideal object which appeals to us as desirable. And appreciation not merely apprehends meanings and realizes values which exist; it imagines possibilities of meaning and value which need to be verified by action and experiment.

Why are these responses of appreciation so generally neglected today as sources of information about the character and organization of the real world? The answer to this question is not far to seek. Our era is the era of s6scientific discovery; our age is the age

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of mechanical invention. Intellectually speaking we live under a spell cast by the rapid triumphal advance of modern natural science, culminating as it has in the evolutionary world-view, the unlocking of the atom, and the discovery of its hidden sources of energy. And as if this were not enough to turn the heads of our generation, human invention applying itself to the physical field and assisted by increasing knowledge of the laws and forces of nature, has in the last century produced a series of mechanical marvels culminating in the automobile, airplane, motion picture and radio, which completely dominate our everyday practical life. The use and enjoyment of these mechanical instruments of rapid movement and sensory stimulation have become the absorbing preoccupation of civilized society today. It is no wonder, therefore, that in our time men look to outward action, to physical experiment, as the sole source of

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information about the existing world, the sole key to the mysteries of the real universe. It could scarcely be otherwise. But such a one-sided and inadequate approach to the central problem of life brings its logical and moral penalties from which our age has not escaped. The complaint is general that contemporary civilization has been mechanized, that in making itself efficient it has made itself trivial, shallow, and commonplace. Such is the inevitable result of neglecting our powers of appreciation, of failing to make sustained collective effort to increase and deepen our appreciation of the essential meaning and unity of the world, of its hidden potentialities of development and progress, of its ever-changing interest and permanent beauty.