Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/318

 304 JOHN DEWEY: merely mental can 'know' the extra-mental. But from a strictly empirical point of view, the smell which knows is no more merely mental than is the rose known. We may, if we please, say that the smell when involving conscious meaning or intention is ' mental,' but this term ' mental ' does not denote some separate type of existence existence as a state of consciousness. It denotes only the fact that the smell, a real and non-psychical object, now exercises an intellectual function. This is, as James has pointed out, an additive relation a new property possessed by an non-mental object, when that object, occurring in a new context, assumes a further office and use. 1 Will not some one who believes that the knowing experience is aborigine a strictly "mental " thing, explain how, as matter of fact, it does get a specific, extra-mental reference, capable of being tested, confirmed or refuted ? Or, if he believes that this way of viewing it as merely mental, does not express its own experienced quality, but only the form it takes for psychological analysis, will he not explain why he so persistently attributes the inherently 41 mental " characterisation of it to the empiricist whom he criticises? An object becomes meaning when used empiri- cally in a certain way ; and, under certain circumstances, the exact character and worth of this meaning becomes an object of solicitude. But the transcendental epistemologist with his purely psychical "meanings " and his purely extra- empirical "truths" appears to assume a Deus ex Ma-china whose mechanism is preserved a secret. Observing the futility of such a method, one may turn scientist, and then epistemologist only as logician, only, that is, as reflecting upon the nature and implications of the scientific process. One might, that is, observe the cases in which odours mean other things than just roses, might vol- untarily produce new cases for the sake of further inspection, and thus come to account for the cases where meanings had been falsified in the issue ; to discriminate more carefully the peculiarities of those meanings which the event verified, and thus to safeguard and bulwark to some extent the employ of similar meanings in the future. The presupposition here is clearly that odour, person and rose are elements in one and the same real world (or, what is the same thing, of the con- stitution of one object), and that accordingly specific and 1 " Does ' Consciousness ' Exist ? " The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Method", vol. i., p. 480. The whole article should be con- sulted. It has, of course, attracted much attention ; but its full logical bearing, in cutting under the charge of psychologism as mere subjectiv- ism, does not seem to me to have been appreciated as yet.