Page:Philosophical Review Volume 22.djvu/146

130 to the field of things already dead, if conceptual thought is guilty of playing such havoc. They are right in holding that sense-perception is not the sole source and sense-perceived things not the sole objects of knowledge. A being capable only of looking outward would miss a body of experiences which mere outward-gazing intelligence can never reach. Living consciousness is an event in the world which living consciousness alone can know. If there can be science only where there are static absolutes, then every attempt to treat life and mind scientifically must be a falsification of them and science had better let them alone.

But it is not necessary to take such a one-sided view of intelligence and knowledge. Science is not limited to outward perception. Intelligence is not limited to the function of chopping things up and counting, measuring, and arranging the bits; synthesis is as much its function as analysis. The two functions imply each other, one is impossible without the other; how could there be counting, measuring, and arranging without either? It is true, the intellect can never reproduce the original experience as it appears in inner or outer perception; all the science and philosophy in the world will not enable the blind man to experience colors in his thoughts as he would if he actually saw them. But it is not the aim of thinking to photograph experiences: thinking does not intend to repeat the work of perception, but to illuminate and interpret perception, to analyze and synthetize, to discover similarities and differences, to determine the various relations existing between what is given. Even though the mind longs for flesh and blood pictures of reality, for sensuous images, and keeps close to them in its thinking, the purpose of thought is never to reinstate the original experiences just as they were experienced, or to create new ones after the manner of the realistic painter, that is, to give its thought complete perceptual expression again. Indeed, it may well be asked which of the many possible experiences is to be reinstated, the experience of the ignorant unreflecting mind or the experience of the trained thinker? It is not true that if we could observe all natural processes, we should need no science to explain them.