Chapter Eleven
Experience and Thinking
1. The Nature of Experience. The nature of experience can be
understood only by noting that it includes an active and a
passive element peculiarly combined. On the active hand,
experience is trying -- a meaning which is made explicit in the
connected term experiment. On the passive, it is undergoing.
When we experience something we act upon it, we do something with
it; then we suffer or undergo the consequences. We do something
to the thing and then it does something to us in return: such is
the peculiar combination. The connection of these two phases of
experience measures the fruitfulness or value of the experience.
Mere activity does not constitute experience. It is dispersive,
centrifugal, dissipating. Experience as trying involves change,
but change is meaningless transition unless it is consciously
connected with the return wave of consequences which flow from
it. When an activity is continued into the undergoing of
consequences, when the change made by action is reflected back
into a change made in us, the mere flux is loaded with
significance. We learn something. It is not experience when a
child merely sticks his finger into a flame; it is experience
when the movement is connected with the pain which he undergoes
in consequence. Henceforth the sticking of the finger into flame
means a burn. Being burned is a mere physical change, like the
burning of a stick of wood, if it is not perceived as a
consequence of some other action. Blind and capricious impulses
hurry us on heedlessly from one thing to another. So far as this
happens, everything is writ in water. There is none of that
cumulative growth which makes an experience in any vital sense of
that term. On the other hand, many things happen to us in the
way of pleasure and pain which we do not connect with any prior
activity of our own. They are mere accidents so far as we are
concerned. There is no before or after to such experience; no
retrospect nor outlook, and consequently no meaning. We get
nothing which may be carried over to foresee what is likely to
happen next, and no gain in ability to adjust ourselves to what
is coming--no added control. Only by courtesy can such an
experience be called experience. To "learn from experience" is
to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to
things and what we enjoy or suffer from things in consequence.
Under such conditions, doing becomes a trying; an experiment with
the world to find out what it is like; the undergoing becomes
instruction--discovery of the connection of things.
Two conclusions important for education follow. (1) Experience
is primarily an active-passive affair; it is not primarily
cognitive. But (2) the measure of the value of an experience
lies in the perception of relationships or continuities to which
it leads up. It includes cognition in the degree in which it is
cumulative or amounts to something, or has meaning. In schools,
those under instruction are too customarily looked upon as
acquiring knowledge as theoretical spectators, minds which
appropriate knowledge by direct energy of intellect. The very
word pupil has almost come to mean one who is engaged not in
having fruitful experiences but in absorbing knowledge directly.
Something which is called mind or consciousness is severed from
the physical organs of activity. The former is then thought to
be purely intellectual and cognitive; the latter to be an
irrelevant and intruding physical factor. The intimate union of
activity and undergoing its consequences which leads to
recognition of meaning is broken; instead we have two fragments:
mere bodily action on one side, and meaning directly grasped by
"spiritual" activity on the other.
It would be impossible to state adequately the evil results which
have flowed from this dualism of mind and body, much less to
exaggerate them. Some of the more striking effects, may,
however, be enumerated. (a) In part bodily activity becomes an
intruder. Having nothing, so it is thought, to do with mental
activity, it becomes a distraction, an evil to be contended with.
For the pupil has a body, and brings it to school along with his
mind. And the body is, of necessity, a wellspring of energy; it
has to do something. But its activities, not being utilized in
occupation with things which yield significant results, have to
be frowned upon. They lead the pupil away from the lesson with
which his "mind" ought to be occupied; they are sources of
mischief. The chief source of the "problem of discipline" in
schools is that the teacher has often to spend the larger part of
the time in suppressing the bodily activities which take the mind
away from its material. A premium is put on physical quietude;
on silence, on rigid uniformity of posture and movement; upon a
machine-like simulation of the attitudes of intelligent interest.
The teachers' business is to hold the pupils up to these
requirements and to punish the inevitable deviations which occur.
The nervous strain and fatigue which result with both teacher and
pupil are a necessary consequence of the abnormality of the
situation in which bodily activity is divorced from the
perception of meaning. Callous indifference and explosions from
strain alternate. The neglected body, having no organized
fruitful channels of activity, breaks forth, without knowing why
or how, into meaningless boisterousness, or settles into equally
meaningless fooling -- both very different from the normal play
of children. Physically active children become restless and
unruly; the more quiescent, so-called conscientious ones spend
what energy they have in the negative task of keeping their
instincts and active tendencies suppressed, instead of in a
positive one of constructive planning and execution; they are
thus educated not into responsibility for the significant and
graceful use of bodily powers, but into an enforced duty not to
give them free play. It may be seriously asserted that a chief
cause for the remarkable achievements of Greek education was that
it was never misled by false notions into an attempted separation
of mind and body.
(b) Even, however, with respect to the lessons which have to be
learned by the application of "mind," some bodily activities have
to be used. The senses -- especially the eye and ear -- have to
be employed to take in what the book, the map, the blackboard,
and the teacher say. The lips and vocal organs, and the hands,
have to be used to reproduce in speech and writing what has been
stowed away. The senses are then regarded as a kind of
mysterious conduit through which information is conducted from
the external world into the mind; they are spoken of as gateways
and avenues of knowledge. To keep the eyes on the book and the
ears open to the teacher's words is a mysterious source of
intellectual grace. Moreover, reading, writing, and
figuring -- important school arts -- demand muscular or motor
training. The muscles of eye, hand, and vocal organs accordingly
have to be trained to act as pipes for carrying knowledge back
out of the mind into external action. For it happens that using
the muscles repeatedly in the same way fixes in them an
automatic tendency to repeat.
The obvious result is a mechanical use of the bodily activities
which (in spite of the generally obtrusive and interfering
character of the body in mental action) have to be employed more
or less. For the senses and muscles are used not as organic
participants in having an instructive experience, but as external
inlets and outlets of mind. Before the child goes to school, he
learns with his hand, eye, and ear, because they are organs of
the process of doing something from which meaning results. The
boy flying a kite has to keep his eye on the kite, and has to
note the various pressures of the string on his hand. His senses
are avenues of knowledge not because external facts are somehow
"conveyed" to the brain, but because they are used in doing
something with a purpose. The qualities of seen and touched
things have a bearing on what is done, and are alertly perceived;
they have a meaning. But when pupils are expected to use their
eyes to note the form of words, irrespective of their meaning, in
order to reproduce them in spelling or reading, the resulting
training is simply of isolated sense organs and muscles. It is
such isolation of an act from a purpose which makes it
mechanical. It is customary for teachers to urge children to
read with expression, so as to bring out the meaning. But if
they originally learned the sensory- motor technique of reading
-- the ability to identify forms and to reproduce the sounds they
stand for -- by methods which did not call for attention to
meaning, a mechanical habit was established which makes it
difficult to read subsequently with intelligence. The vocal
organs have been trained to go their own way automatically in
isolation; and meaning cannot be tied on at will. Drawing,
singing, and writing may be taught in the same mechanical way;
for, we repeat, any way is mechanical which narrows down the
bodily activity so that a separation of body from mind -- that
is, from recognition of meaning -- is set up. Mathematics, even
in its higher branches, when undue emphasis is put upon the
technique of calculation, and science, when laboratory exercises
are given for their own sake, suffer from the same evil.
(c) On the intellectual side, the separation of "mind" from
direct occupation with things throws emphasis on things at the
expense of relations or connections. It is altogether too common
to separate perceptions and even ideas from judgments. The
latter are thought to come after the former in order to compare
them. It is alleged that the mind perceives things apart from
relations; that it forms ideas of them in isolation from their
connections -- with what goes before and comes after. Then
judgment or thought is called upon to combine the separated items
of "knowledge" so that their resemblance or causal connection
shall be brought out. As matter of fact, every perception and
every idea is a sense of the bearings, use, and cause, of a
thing. We do not really know a chair or have an idea of it by
inventorying and enumerating its various isolated qualities, but
only by bringing these qualities into connection with something
else -- the purpose which makes it a chair and not a table; or
its difference from the kind of chair we are accustomed to, or
the "period" which it represents, and so on. A wagon is not
perceived when all its parts are summed up; it is the
characteristic connection of the parts which makes it a wagon.
And these connections are not those of mere physical
juxtaposition; they involve connection with the animals that draw
it, the things that are carried on it, and so on. Judgment is
employed in the perception; otherwise the perception is mere
sensory excitation or else a recognition of the result of a prior
judgment, as in the case of familiar objects.
Words, the counters for ideals, are, however, easily taken for
ideas. And in just the degree in which mental activity is
separated from active concern with the world, from doing
something and connecting the doing with what is undergone, words,
symbols, come to take the place of ideas. The substitution is
the more subtle because some meaning is recognized. But we are
very easily trained to be content with a minimum of meaning, and
to fail to note how restricted is our perception of the relations
which confer significance. We get so thoroughly used to a kind
of pseudo-idea, a half perception, that we are not aware how
half-dead our mental action is, and how much keener and more
extensive our observations and ideas would be if we formed them
under conditions of a vital experience which required us to use
judgment: to hunt for the connections of the thing dealt with.
There is no difference of opinion as to the theory of the matter.
All authorities agree that that discernment of relationships is
the genuinely intellectual matter; hence, the educative matter.
The failure arises in supposing that relationships can become
perceptible without experience -- without that conjoint trying
and undergoing of which we have spoken. It is assumed that
"mind" can grasp them if it will only give attention, and that
this attention may be given at will irrespective of the
situation. Hence the deluge of half-observations, of verbal
ideas, and unassimilated "knowledge" which afflicts the world.
An ounce of experience is better than a ton of theory simply
because it is only in experience that any theory has vital and
verifiable significance. An experience, a very humble
experience, is capable of generating and carrying any amount of
theory (or intellectual content), but a theory apart from an
experience cannot be definitely grasped even as theory. It tends
to become a mere verbal formula, a set of catchwords used to
render thinking, or genuine theorizing, unnecessary and
impossible. Because of our education we use words, thinking they
are ideas, to dispose of questions, the disposal being in reality
simply such an obscuring of perception as prevents us from seeing
any longer the difficulty.
2. Reflection in Experience. Thought or reflection, as we have
already seen virtually if not explicitly, is the discernment of
the relation between what we try to do and what happens in
consequence. No experience having a meaning is possible without
some element of thought. But we may contrast two types of
experience according to the proportion of reflection found in
them. All our experiences have a phase of "cut and try" in them
-- what psychologists call the method of trial and error. We
simply do something, and when it fails, we do something else, and
keep on trying till we hit upon something which works, and then
we adopt that method as a rule of thumb measure in subsequent
procedure. Some experiences have very little else in them than
this hit and miss or succeed process. We see that a certain way
of acting and a certain consequence are connected, but we do not
see how they are. We do not see the details of the connection;
the links are missing. Our discernment is very gross. In other
cases we push our observation farther. We analyze to see just
what lies between so as to bind together cause and effect,
activity and consequence. This extension of our insight makes
foresight more accurate and comprehensive. The action which
rests simply upon the trial and error method is at the mercy of
circumstances; they may change so that the act performed does not
operate in the way it was expected to. But if we know in detail
upon what the result depends, we can look to see whether the
required conditions are there. The method extends our practical
control. For if some of the conditions are missing, we may, if
we know what the needed antecedents for an effect are, set to
work to supply them; or, if they are such as to produce
undesirable effects as well, we may eliminate some of the
superfluous causes and economize effort.
In discovery of the detailed connections of our activities and
what happens in consequence, the thought implied in cut and try
experience is made explicit. Its quantity increases so that its
proportionate value is very different. Hence the quality of the
experience changes; the change is so significant that we may call
this type of experience reflective -- that is, reflective par
excellence. The deliberate cultivation of this phase of thought
constitutes thinking as a distinctive experience. Thinking, in
other words, is the intentional endeavor to discover specific
connections between something which we do and the consequences
which result, so that the two become continuous. Their
isolation, and consequently their purely arbitrary going
together, is canceled; a unified developing situation takes its
place. The occurrence is now understood; it is explained; it is
reasonable, as we say, that the thing should happen as it does.
Thinking is thus equivalent to an explicit rendering of the
intelligent element in our experience. It makes it possible to
act with an end in view. It is the condition of our having aims.
As soon as an infant begins to expect he begins to use something
which is now going on as a sign of something to follow; he is, in
however simple a fashion, judging. For he takes one thing as
evidence of something else, and so recognizes a relationship.
Any future development, however elaborate it may be, is only an
extending and a refining of this simple act of inference. All
that the wisest man can do is to observe what is going on more
widely and more minutely and then select more carefully from what
is noted just those factors which point to something to happen.
The opposites, once more, to thoughtful action are routine and
capricious behavior. The former accepts what has been customary
as a full measure of possibility and omits to take into account
the connections of the particular things done. The latter makes
the momentary act a measure of value, and ignores the connections
of our personal action with the energies of the environment. It
says, virtually, "things are to be just as I happen to like them
at this instant," as routine says in effect "let things continue
just as I have found them in the past." Both refuse to
acknowledge responsibility for the future consequences which flow
from present action. Reflection is the acceptance of such
responsibility.
The starting point of any process of thinking is something going
on, something which just as it stands is incomplete or
unfulfilled. Its point, its meaning lies literally in what it is
going to be, in how it is going to turn out. As this is written,
the world is filled with the clang of contending armies. For an
active participant in the war, it is clear that the momentous
thing is the issue, the future consequences, of this and that
happening. He is identified, for the time at least, with the
issue; his fate hangs upon the course things are taking. But
even for an onlooker in a neutral country, the significance of
every move made, of every advance here and retreat there, lies in
what it portends. To think upon the news as it comes to us is to
attempt to see what is indicated as probable or possible
regarding an outcome. To fill our heads, like a scrapbook, with
this and that item as a finished and done-for thing, is not to
think. It is to turn ourselves into a piece of registering
apparatus. To consider the bearing of the occurrence upon what
may be, but is not yet, is to think. Nor will the reflective
experience be different in kind if we substitute distance in time
for separation in space. Imagine the war done with, and a future
historian giving an account of it. The episode is, by
assumption, past. But he cannot give a thoughtful account of the
war save as he preserves the time sequence; the meaning of each
occurrence, as he deals with it, lies in what was future for it,
though not for the historian. To take it by itself as a complete
existence is to take it unreflectively. Reflection also implies
concern with the issue -- a certain sympathetic identification of
our own destiny, if only dramatic, with the outcome of the course
of events. For the general in the war, or a common soldier, or a
citizen of one of the contending nations, the stimulus to
thinking is direct and urgent. For neutrals, it is indirect and
dependent upon imagination. But the flagrant partisanship of
human nature is evidence of the intensity of the tendency to
identify ourselves with one possible course of events, and to
reject the other as foreign. If we cannot take sides in overt
action, and throw in our little weight to help determine the
final balance, we take sides emotionally and imaginatively. We
desire this or that outcome. One wholly indifferent to the
outcome does not follow or think about what is happening at all.
From this dependence of the act of thinking upon a sense of
sharing in the consequences of what goes on, flows one of the
chief paradoxes of thought. Born in partiality, in order to
accomplish its tasks it must achieve a certain detached
impartiality. The general who allows his hopes and desires to
affect his observations and interpretations of the existing
situation will surely make a mistake in calculation. While hopes
and fears may be the chief motive for a thoughtful following of
the war on the part of an onlooker in a neutral country, he too
will think ineffectively in the degree in which his preferences
modify the stuff of his observations and reasonings. There is,
however, no incompatibility between the fact that the occasion of
reflection lies in a personal sharing in what is going on and the
fact that the value of the reflection lies upon keeping one's
self out of the data. The almost insurmountable difficulty of
achieving this detachment is evidence that thinking originates in
situations where the course of thinking is an actual part of the
course of events and is designed to influence the result. Only
gradually and with a widening of the area of vision through a
growth of social sympathies does thinking develop to include what
lies beyond our direct interests: a fact of great significance
for education.
To say that thinking occurs with reference to situations which
are still going on, and incomplete, is to say that thinking
occurs when things are uncertain or doubtful or problematic.
Only what is finished, completed, is wholly assured. Where there
is reflection there is suspense. The object of thinking is to
help reach a conclusion, to project a possible termination on the
basis of what is already given. Certain other facts about
thinking accompany this feature. Since the situation in which
thinking occurs is a doubtful one, thinking is a process of
inquiry, of looking into things, of investigating. Acquiring is
always secondary, and instrumental to the act of inquiring. It
is seeking, a quest, for something that is not at hand. We
sometimes talk as if "original research" were a peculiar
prerogative of scientists or at least of advanced students. But
all thinking is research, and all research is native, original,
with him who carries it on, even if everybody else in the world
already is sure of what he is still looking for.
It also follows that all thinking involves a risk. Certainty
cannot be guaranteed in advance. The invasion of the unknown is
of the nature of an adventure; we cannot be sure in advance. The
conclusions of thinking, till confirmed by the event, are,
accordingly, more or less tentative or hypothetical. Their
dogmatic assertion as final is unwarranted, short of the issue,
in fact. The Greeks acutely raised the question: How can we
learn? For either we know already what we are after, or else we
do not know. In neither case is learning possible; on the first
alternative because we know already; on the second, because we do
not know what to look for, nor if, by chance, we find it can we
tell that it is what we were after. The dilemma makes no
provision for coming to know, for learning; it assumes either
complete knowledge or complete ignorance. Nevertheless the
twilight zone of inquiry, of thinking, exists. The possibility
of hypothetical conclusions, of tentative results, is the fact
which the Greek dilemma overlooked. The perplexities of the
situation suggest certain ways out. We try these ways, and
either push our way out, in which case we know we have found what
we were looking for, or the situation gets darker and more
confused--in which case, we know we are still ignorant.
Tentative means trying out, feeling one's way along
provisionally. Taken by itself, the Greek argument is a nice
piece of formal logic. But it is also true that as long as men
kept a sharp disjunction between knowledge and ignorance, science
made only slow and accidental advance. Systematic advance in
invention and discovery began when men recognized that they could
utilize doubt for purposes of inquiry by forming conjectures to
guide action in tentative explorations, whose development would
confirm, refute, or modify the guiding conjecture. While the
Greeks made knowledge more than learning, modern science makes
conserved knowledge only a means to learning, to discovery. To
recur to our illustration. A commanding general cannot base his
actions upon either absolute certainty or absolute ignorance. He
has a certain amount of information at hand which is, we will
assume, reasonably trustworthy. He then infers certain
prospective movements, thus assigning meaning to the bare facts
of the given situation. His inference is more or less dubious
and hypothetical. But he acts upon it. He develops a plan of
procedure, a method of dealing with the situation. The
consequences which directly follow from his acting this way
rather than that test and reveal the worth of his reflections.
What he already knows functions and has value in what he learns.
But will this account apply in the case of the one in a neutral
country who is thoughtfully following as best he can the progress
of events? In form, yes, though not of course in content. It is
self-evident that his guesses about the future indicated by
present facts, guesses by which he attempts to supply meaning to
a multitude of disconnected data, cannot be the basis of a method
which shall take effect in the campaign. That is not his
problem. But in the degree in which he is actively thinking, and
not merely passively following the course of events, his
tentative inferences will take effect in a method of procedure
appropriate to his situation. He will anticipate certain future
moves, and will be on the alert to see whether they happen or
not. In the degree in which he is intellectually concerned, or
thoughtful, he will be actively on the lookout; he will take
steps which although they do not affect the campaign, modify in
some degree his subsequent actions. Otherwise his later "I told
you so" has no intellectual quality at all; it does not mark any
testing or verification of prior thinking, but only a coincidence
that yields emotional satisfaction -- and includes a large factor
of self-deception. The case is comparable to that of an
astronomer who from given data has been led to foresee (infer) a
future eclipse. No matter how great the mathematical
probability, the inference is hypothetical -- a matter of
probability. 1 The hypothesis as to the date and position of the
anticipated eclipse becomes the material of forming a method of
future conduct. Apparatus is arranged; possibly an expedition is
made to some far part of the globe. In any case, some active
steps are taken which actually change some physical conditions.
And apart from such steps and the consequent modification of the
situation, there is no completion of the act of thinking. It
remains suspended. Knowledge, already attained knowledge,
controls thinking and makes it fruitful.
So much for the general features of a reflective experience.
They are (i) perplexity, confusion, doubt, due to the fact that
one is implicated in an incomplete situation whose full character
is not yet determined; (ii) a conjectural anticipation -- a
tentative interpretation of the given elements, attributing to
them a tendency to effect certain consequences; (iii) a careful
survey (examination, inspection, exploration, analysis) of all
attainable consideration which will define and clarify the
problem in hand; (iv) a consequent elaboration of the tentative
hypothesis to make it more precise and more consistent, because
squaring with a wider range of facts; (v) taking one stand upon
the projected hypothesis as a plan of action which is applied to
the existing state of affairs: doing something overtly to bring
about the anticipated result, and thereby testing the hypothesis.
It is the extent and accuracy of steps three and four which mark
off a distinctive reflective experience from one on the trial and
error plane. They make thinking itself into an experience.
Nevertheless, we never get wholly beyond the trial and error
situation. Our most elaborate and rationally consistent thought
has to be tried in the world and thereby tried out. And since it
can never take into account all the connections, it can never
cover with perfect accuracy all the consequences. Yet a
thoughtful survey of conditions is so careful, and the guessing
at results so controlled, that we have a right to mark off the
reflective experience from the grosser trial and error forms of
action.
Summary. In determining the place of thinking in experience we
first noted that experience involves a connection of doing or
trying with something which is undergone in consequence. A
separation of the active doing phase from the passive undergoing
phase destroys the vital meaning of an experience. Thinking is
the accurate and deliberate instituting of connections between
what is done and its consequences. It notes not only that they
are connected, but the details of the connection. It makes
connecting links explicit in the form of relationships. The
stimulus to thinking is found when we wish to determine the
significance of some act, performed or to be performed. Then we
anticipate consequences. This implies that the situation as it
stands is, either in fact or to us, incomplete and hence
indeterminate. The projection of consequences means a proposed
or tentative solution. To perfect this hypothesis, existing
conditions have to be carefully scrutinized and the implications
of the hypothesis developed -- an operation called reasoning.
Then the suggested solution -- the idea or theory -- has to be
tested by acting upon it. If it brings about certain
consequences, certain determinate changes, in the world, it is
accepted as valid. Otherwise it is modified, and another trial
made. Thinking includes all of these steps, -- the sense of a
problem, the observation of conditions, the formation and
rational elaboration of a suggested conclusion, and the active
experimental testing. While all thinking results in knowledge,
ultimately the value of knowledge is subordinate to its use in
thinking. For we live not in a settled and finished world, but
in one which is going on, and where our main task is prospective,
and where retrospect -- and all knowledge as distinct from
thought is retrospect -- is of value in the solidity, security,
and fertility it affords our dealings with the future.
1 It is most important for the practice of science that men in
many cases can calculate the degree of probability and the amount
of probable error involved, but that does alter the features of
the situation as described. It refines them.