development, which is to be sketched in the present chapter.

In 1887 Dewey published in Mind an article entitled "Knowledge as Idealisation."[21] This article is, in effect, a consideration of one of the special problems of the "psychological method." If reality is an eternal and all-inclusive consciousness, in which sensations and meanings are ordered according to a rational system, what must be the nature of the finite thought-process which apprehends this reality? In his previous articles Dewey had proposed the "psychological method" as an actual mode of investigation, and questions concerning the nature of the human thought-process naturally forced themselves upon his attention.

The thought-process is, to begin with, a relating activity which gives meaning to experience. Says Dewey: "When Psychology recognizes that the relating activity of mind is one not exercised upon sensations, but one which supplies relations and thereby makes meaning (makes experience, as Kant said), Psychology will be in a position to explain, and thus to become Philosophy."[22] This statement raises the more specific question, what is meaning?

Every idea, Dewey remarks, has two aspects: existence and meaning. "Recognizing that every psychical fact does have these two aspects, we shall, for the present, confine ourselves to asking the nature, function and origin of the aspect of meaning or significance—the content of the idea as opposed to its existence."[23] The meaning aspect of the idea cannot be reduced to the centrally excited image existences which form a part of the existence-aspect of the idea. "I repeat, as existence, we have only a clustering of sensuous feelings, stronger and weaker."[24] But the thing is not perceived as a clustering of feelings; the sensations are immediately interpreted as a significant object. "Perceiving, to restate a psychological commonplace, is interpreting. The content of the perception is what is signified."[25] Dewey's treatment of sensations, at this point, is somewhat uncertain. If it be a manifold that is given to the act of interpretation, Kant's difficulty is again presented. The bare sensations taken by themselves mean nothing, and yet everything does mean something in being apprehended. The conclusion should be that there is no such thing as mere existence. Dewey's judgment is undecided on this issue. "It is true enough," he says, "that without the idea as existence there would be no experience; the sensuous clustering is a condition sine qua non of all, even the highest spiritual, consciousness. But it is none the less true that if we could strip any psychical existence of all its qualities except bare existence, there would be nothing left, not even existence, for our intelligence.... If we take out of an experience all that it means, as distinguished from what it is—a particular occurrence at a certain time, there is no psychical experience. The barest fragment of consciousness that can be hit upon has meaning as well as being."[26] An interpretation of reality as truly organic would treat mechanical sensation as a pure fiction. But Dewey clings to 'existence' as a necessary 'aspect' of the psychical fact. The terms and relations never entirely fuse, although they are indispensable to each other. There is danger that the resulting view of experience will be somewhat angular and structural.

At one point, indeed, Dewey asserts that there is no such thing as a merely immediate psychical fact, at least for our experience. "So far is it from being true that we know only what is immediately present in consciousness, that it should rather be said that what is immediately present is never known."[27] But in the next paragraph Dewey remarks: "That which is immediately present is the sensuous existence; that which is known is the content conveyed by this existence."[28] The sensation is not known, and therefore probably not experienced. In this case Dewey is departing from his own principles, by introducing non-experienced factors into his interpretation of experience. The language is ambiguous. If nothing is immediately given, then the sensuous content is not so given.

The 'sensuous existences' assumed by Dewey are the ghosts of Kant's 'manifold of sensation.' The difficulty comes out clearly in the following passage: "It is indifferent to the sensation whether it is interpreted as a cloud or as a mountain; a danger signal, or a signal of open passage. The auditory sensation remains unchanged whether it is interpreted as an evil spirit urging one to murder, or as intra-organic, due to disordered blood-pressure.... It is not the sensation in and of itself that means this or that object; it is the sensation as associated, composed, identified, or discriminated with other experiences; the sensation, in short, as mediated. The whole worth of the sensation for intelligence is the meaning it has by virtue of its relation to the rest of experience."[29]

There is an obvious parallel between this view of experience and Kant's. Kant, indeed, transcended the notion that experience is a structure of sensations set in a frame-work of thought forms; but the first Critique undoubtedly leaves the average reader with such a conception of experience. It is unjust to Kant, however, to take the mechanical aspect of his thought as its most important phase. He stands, in the opinion of modern critics, at a half-way stage between the mechanism of the eighteenth century and the organic logic of the nineteenth, and his works point the way from the lower to the higher point of view. This was recognized by Hegel and by his followers in England. How does it happen, then, that Dewey, who was well-read in the philosophical literature of the day, should have persisted in a view of experience which appears to assume the externally organized manifold of the Critique of Pure Reason? Or, to put the question more explicitly, why did he retain as a fundamental assumption Kant's 'manifold of sensations'?

So far, Dewey has been concerned with the nature of meaning. He now turns to knowledge, and the knowing process as that which gives meaning to experience. Knowledge, or science, he says,