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The Philosophy of the Present
Supplementary Essay 2: The Physical Thing
II
THE PHYSICAL THING[1]
A. It is evident that a definition of the physical
thing in terms of manipulatory and distance experience must apply
also to the organism as a physical thing. The organism is seen and
felt. We supplement what comes through direct vision by what is obtained
through mirrors and visual images, and our hands come into contact
with practically the whole surface of our bodies. Kinaesthetic and
visceral experiences can be located as inside our organisms only when
these organisms have attained outsides. If we use pressures of surfaces
of our own bodies against each other in the experience of bodies acting
upon us, this only takes place in so far as the body and other objects
have been organized in a common field of physical things. Without
doubt surfaces in contact and organic experiences bounded by these
surfaces are, in the experience of the infant, the experiences out
of which the outsides and insides of things arise. However, the child
can delimit his bodily surfaces only through things not his body,
and he reaches the entire surfaces of things not his body before he
reaches his own organism as a bounded thing. Genetically the infant
advances from the periphery toward his body. If he uses the pressures
of the organism in putting insides into things, the body must earlier
have been defined by its contacts with bounded things. It is important
to recognize that this continues in experience to be the relationship
between physical things and the body as a physical thing, and between
physical (120) things other than the body. We get
by analysis into the insides of things only by reaching new outsides
which are actually or imaginatively the conditions for that pressure
experience which appears as the inside either of the body or of other
physical things.
Sets of physical things are then defined by their boundaries, and
among those things the bodily organism obtains its definition in the
same fashion. If for example we regard the colors and tactual feel
of things as dependent upon physiological processes within the organism,
the argument proceeds upon the assumption of definable physical things
including the organism as there. In experience there is no priority
of reality ascribed to the bodily organism. If it is conceivable that
the hand should pass through the table that is seen, it is equally
conceivable that the hand should pass through the seen leg. These
physical things are all of them distance experiences. That is, they
are placed in a space, and to be so placed they are ordered from center
0 of a system of coordinates. The forms in which they appear are optical
perspectives, and perception realizes them in terms of the experience
of the manipulatory area, in which they are subject to the test of
contact, for their perceptual reality; but they remain in that area
visual objects. Within this manipulatory area the distortions of the
optical perspectives disappear. Things reach standard sizes. That
they have standard sizes implies that the center O may be found at
any point where the things would have the spatial values found in
this manipulatory area. The fundamental postulate of Newtonian physics
that any set of Cartesian coordinates may be taken as the basis for
the ordering and measuring of things and their motions is involved
in our perceptual world. Conceptual thought has formulated logically
the attitude of perceptual experience. The question then arises, what
i's the nature of this attitude by which perception (121)
shifts indifferently from one center to another?
In immediate perception distance stimulations are adequate to call
out approach or withdrawal, and consequent contacts and consummations.
That perception should present distant objects as having the physical
values of the manipulatory area is not involved in the successful
behavior of a percipient organism. To say that the memory image of
the distant stimulation as it appeared in a manipulatory area is fused
with the distant stimulation is to cover up a process with a term.
It can be so fused because the distant stimulation is already a physical
thing. Within the manipulatory area the object acts upon the percipient
organism, and action in the perceptual experience means the pressure
of its volume upon the organism. There are an infinity of other characteristics
of its action, its temperature, its odor and so forth; but these are
all characteristics of it as a massive thing, and this inner nature
of the physical thing we never reach by subdividing its visual boundaries.
There appears in the physical thing a content which originally belongs
only to the organism, that of pressure, what Whitehead has called
the "pushiness" of things, and the question is how it gets
into the thing. Distant visual and contact tactual boundaries are
there in immediate experience. I am not considering the metaphysical
question of how we get from an inner experience to a world outside
ourselves, but how distant and bounded objects get the insides of
perceptual objects-insides never revealed by subdivision. The suggestion
which I have already made is that the pressures of bodily surfaces
against each other, preeminently of one hand against the other, are
transferred to the object, and the question I am raising is how this
transference takes place.
The only answer that I can give to the question is that the organism
in grasping and pushing things is identifying (122)
its own effort with the contact experience of the thing. It increases
that experience by its own efforts. To take hold of a hard object
is to stimulate oneself to exert that inner effort. One arouses in
himself an action which comes also from the inside of the thing. It
comes from the inside of the thing because the experience is increased
by the action of bodies upon organisms and upon other things within
the perceptual world. The organism's object arouses in the organism
the action of the object upon the organism, and so becomes endowed
with that inner nature of pressure which constitutes the inside of
the physical thing. It is only in so far as the organism thus takes
the attitude of the thing that the thing acquires such an inside.
The formula for this process is that the thing stimulates the organism
to act as the thing acts upon the organism, and that the action of
the thing is the organism's resistance to pressure such as arises
when a hard object is firmly grasped in the hand. The resistance of
the object is continuous with the effort of the hand. In the development
of the infant this experience must come earlier than that of its own
physical organism as a whole. The infant must be placing this effort
of his inside of things before he is in a position to identify the
effort as his own. His surroundings stretch away on all sides, and
colored shapes come to be located and familiar in a world within which
his body comes finally to occupy a defined place. Meantime the pressure
of his body and the grasping of his hands have to localize things
from an inside attitude, and he finally reaches himself as a thing
through the action of other things upon him. Matter is the name we
give to this nature of things, and its characteristic is that it is
identical with the response that it calls out. Weight as pressure,
or inertia as resistance to change of rest or motion, is identical
with the effort by which the weight is upheld or the body is brought
into motion or (123) set at rest. The body has an
abundance of other characters which inhere in the matter, but none
of these others has this characteristic. Color, sound, taste, and
odor cannot be identified with the responses which they elicit, either
in organisms or in other objects; while the experiential inner content
of matter is identical with the responses which it calls out in things.
It was the striking achievement of Renaissance science that it isolated
this character of matter as inertia. Newton could refer to it either
as the quantity of matter or as the property of matter by which it
continues in its state of rest or motion unless acted upon by an external
force. Inertia and force could then be equated. In the equations of
Newtonian mechanics mass is defined in terms of force and force is
defined in terms of mass. Here Newton was reflecting a fundamental
attitude of experience toward things.
We are now, I think, in a position to answer the question raised
earlier: how do we come to give to the thing at a distance the physical
values of the manipulatory area? Another phrasing of the question
would be; what is the experiential background of the homogeneity of
space? In the first place, the continuity of the experience of effort
and the matter of the physical thing provide a common inner nature
of things that is recognized whenever the distance experience is completed
in its contact implications. In the second place, this inner nature
is there only in so far as it calls out the response of effort. The
distant object, setting in train the responses of grasping and manipulation,
calls out in the organism its own inner nature of resistance. We have
here the basis for Lipps' empathy. It would be a mistake to regard
this inner nature of matter as a projection by the organism of its
sense of effort into the object. The resistance is in the thing as
much as the effort is in the organism, but the resistance is there
only over against effort (124) or the action of
other things. Brought thus within the field of effort, action and
reaction are equal. The inner character of the thing is indeed due
to the organism-to the continuity of effort and resistance. However,
the character of innerness arises only with the appearance of the
organism as an object, with the definition of surfaces and experiences
of the organism that lie inside of its bounded surfaces. What I wish
to emphasize is that the physical thing in contact pressures, and
at a distance in awakening anticipatory manipulatory responses, calls
out in the organism what is continuous with its own inner nature,
so that the action of the thing where it is, is identified with the
response of the organism. It is this that makes it possible for the
organism to place itself and its manipulatory area at any distant
object, and to extend the space of the manipulatory area indefinitely,
thus reaching out of dissonant perspectives a homogeneous space. What
is essential is that the physical thing arouses in the organism its
own response of resistance, that the organism as matter is acting
as the physical thing acts.
There are two expressions I have used above which call for further
comment. One is the identification of the inner effort of the organism
with the matter of the object. As I have indicated, this does not
imply that the organism projects an inner content into the object.
The resistance is there over against the effort, but in the organism
of the infant there is not only the response of pressing against the
thing, but also, through the integration of the central nervous system,
the arousal of the response of pressing the other hand against the
hand that is pressing the thing. The organism acts upon itself, and
in acting upon itself its responses are identical with those it makes
to things. The thing, then, arouses in the organism the. tendency
to respond as the thing responds to the organism. We have learned
(125) in recent years that it is the function of
the central nervous system in the higher forms to connect every response
potentially with every other response in the organism. In a sense
all responses are so interconnected by way of interrelated innervation
and inhibition. There is a distinction to be made, however, between
the object in the manipulatory area that is both seen and handled,
and the distant object that is both out of reach and also lies in
a visual perspective. We have seen that the continuity of effort and
the resistance of matter facilitate the placing of the organism with
its manipulatory area at the distant object. The sense in which this
takes place is found in the responses which would arise at that location,--
responses which are aroused, though inhibited, within the organism.
What I have just been indicating is that the distant object calls
out the response of its own resistance as well as the effort of reacting
to it. What is involved in a distant object being "there"
is not simply the tendency to respond to it, even in an anticipatory
fashion, nor is its location as a physical object achieved by a mere
sensory image of its feel, unless we mean by the memory image the
tendency in the infant's organism to press as the distant object presses,
thus calling out the tendency to respond with his own pressure. It
is this latter response that in our experience constitutes the physical
object -- a something with an inside. I am convinced that this embodiment
of the object in the responses of the organism is the essential factor
in the emergence of the physical thing.
The object is there in its immediate resistance to the effort of
the organism. It is not there as an object, however, that is, it has
no inside. It gets its inside when it arouses in the organism its
own response and thus the answering response of the organism to this
resistance. What has been termed this nature of the object as it is
called out in the organism appears in the sensation of hardness or
resistance. (126) There is indeed, as Locke assumed,
the same extended resistant nature in the experience of the individual
as in the world, but for Locke this was in the experience of the individual
an "idea," that is, a sensation. If we recognize the identity
of resistance and effort, then the character of an "idea,"
i.e., something that belongs in the experience of the individual,
comes to it when the response of the organism is aroused in the form
of the resistance, the inner nature of the thing. These are, as we
have seen, identical in character. Both the physical object and the
organism are material. What must be shown is that the object arouses
in the organism not only an organic response to the physical thing
but also a response to itself as an object calling out this response.
The mechanism by which this is accomplished is the cerebrum. The mechanism
of the cord and its bulb is one simply of responses to outer stimuli.
Such stimuli are imperative in their demands. The cerebrum, on the
other hand, is an organ which integrates a vast variety of responses,
including the lower reflexes, and is specifically the center for the
distance sense organs located in the head. In the integrative process
there are different alternative combinations and corresponding alternatives
also for the inhibitions that integration necessarily involves. This
introduces delay in response, and adjustment by way of selection of
type of response, i.e., choice. Choice implies more than the contest
of two or more stimuli for the control of the organic response. It
implies that the situation is in some sense within the behavior pattern
in the organism. What is not done defines the object in the form in
which we do react to it. The bounding surfaces of an object, its resistances
in various possible reactions upon it, the uses to which it could
be put in varying degrees, go to make up that object, and are characters
of the object that would lose their static nature if the responses
they involve were actually carried out.
(127) They are competitors for the action of the
organism, but in so far as they are not carried out they constitute
the object upon which the action takes place, and within the whole
act fix the conditions of the form the act takes on. All these responses
are found in the nervous system as paths of reaction interconnected
with all the other paths. If certain responses are prepotent they
ipso facto inhibit all the others. It is possible to follow this process
of inhibition in some detail in the use of antagonistic muscles and
conflicting reflexes. There is as definite a relaxation of certain
muscles as there is innervation of others. In order to carry out one
response, the cerebrum inhibits other responses. The system is as
responsible for what it does not do as for what it does.
Within the field of matter, the resistance which the volume of a
body offers to the hand, or to any surface of the body, and the tendencies
to manipulate it when seen at a distance, are organized in various
ways. There is, for example, the tendency to pick up a book on a distant
table. The form and resistance of the book are present in some sense
in the adjustment already present in the organism when the book is
seen. My thesis is that the inhibited contact responses in the distance
experience constitute the meaning of the resistance of the physical
object. They are, in the first place, in opposition to the responses
actually innervated or in prospect of being innervated. They are competitors
for the field of response. They also within the whole act fix the
conditions of the actual response. I am referring specifically to
the responses which go to make up matter in the distance experience.
If I see a distant book an indefinite number of manipulatory responses
are aroused, such as grasping it in a number of ways, opening, tearing
its leaves, pressing upon it, rubbing it, and a host of others. One,
picking up the book, is prepotent and organizes the whole act. It
therefore inhibits all others. The tendencies to perform these others
(128) involve the same resistance of manipulation,
and are now in direct opposition to the prepotent response; but while
in opposition they provide the conditions for the exercise of the
prepotent response. The feel of the book if one rubbed it, the contours
if one passed one's hands about it, the possibility of opening the
book, etc., determine the form that the grasping and lifting up of
the book will take. In general what one does not do to the book, in
so far as this calls out the same resistance as that given in actually
manipulating the book, and in so far as it is inhibited by what one
does do to the book, occupies in the experience the "what the
book is" over against the response which is the expression of
the act. Inhibition here does not connote bare nonexistence of these
responses, for they react back upon the prepotent response to determine
its form and nature. The way in which one grasps the book is determined
by the other paths of response, both by those that are inhibited and
by the controls of adjustments in which responses not carried out
are yet partially innervated. The act is a moving balance within which
many responses play in and out of the prepotent response. What is
not done acts in continual definition of what is done. It is the resistance
in what is not done that is the matter of the object to which we respond.
So far as the world exists for the organism, so far as it is the
environment of the organism, it is reflected in the reactions of the
organism to the world. What we actually come into contact with is
there over against the organism, but by far the larger part of what
surrounds us we do not rest upon nor manipulate. It is distant from
us in space and in time; yet it has an inner content that is a continuation
of what lies under our feet and within our grasp. These distant objects
not only call out in us direct responses of moving toward or away
from and manipulating them, but they also arouse in us the objects
that act upon us from within (129) ourselves. I
have been seeking to present the neural mechanism by which this inner
nature of the outside thing appears in experience.
If the sight of the book calls out a direct response of movement
toward it, there is in this response nothing but the excitement of
the organism to that act. If, however, all the other responses the
book may be responsible for, are aroused, they can only enter into
the act in so far as they are inhibited or co6rdinated. They are in
opposition to the prepotent response of moving toward the book until
the integration of the act arranges them in their spatial and temporal
relations with the inhibition of their immediate expression. It is
this opposition which I have referred to as resistance. The brain
is the portion of the central nervous system that belongs to the distance
senses. It has, however, direct connection with the reflexes of the
spinal system. It not only orients the head, and so the organism,
toward distant objects, but also connects these distant stimuli with
the responses of the trunk and the limbs which these objects call
out when the organism has been brought into contact range of the objects,
so that these later responses are aroused in advance of the situation
within which they can be effectively innervated. The object is then
expressing itself in the organism not only in stimulating it to approach
or withdrawal but also in arousing in anticipatory fashion reactions
that will later be carried out. By the term "expresses itself"
I mean that the relations that make of the surrounding objects the
environment of the organisms are active in the organism. The environment
is there for the organism in the interrelationship of organism and
environment. The delayed responses integrated in the act toward the
distant object constitute the object as it will be or at least may
be for the organism. Put that it may be an object it must have an
inner content, which we refer to as the results (130)
of responses now delayed. That these should be in some sense present
in the distant object is what calls for explanation. The explanation
I am offering is in terms of the resistance they meet in the prepotent
act with reference to which they must be integrated. This resistance
is found in the adjustment and delay in execution and the inhibitions
these entail.
The primary phase of this resistance we have found to lie in the
matter of the physical object. The continuity of the resistance of
the object with the resistances of parts of the organism to each other
constitutes the matter both of the objects and of the organism, and
carries over to objects the innerness of organic resistances to them,
while the objects in their spatial organization lead to the definition
of the organism as a physical object. But, as I have already noted,
this resistance appears as the innerness of the physical thing only
when the object calls out in the organism the object's own attitude
of resistance. The physical thing uses our tendencies to resist in
advance of actual contact, so that it exists in the behavior of the
organism, not as the organism's sensation, but as the entrance of
the organism into objects, through its assuming their attitudes and
thus defining and controlling its own response. There is, of course,
the immediate response of the organism to the pressure that comes
upon it, into which the object as object does not enter. Here there
is no character of an object which would be denominated as a sensation.
There is merely the brute response of organism to its environment.
But when this attitude of resistance of the object to the organism
can be aroused within the organism itself, over against the organism's
resistance to it, then there is that which a philosophy of mind could
locate in the organism as mental - an idea, in Locke's sense. An examination
of the growth of the infant's experience, however, shows that the
environment (131) must first have entered the organic
responses of the child as a resistance it possesses in common with
resistances which the organism offers to itself, before the organism
could define itself and its experiences over against the physical
things around it. It is the mechanism of the cerebrum which, in its
connections with the responses of the cord and the brain stem, has
made possible this playing the part of the physical object within
the behavior of the organism; and in particular it has utilized the
manipulatory responses of the hand in their interruption of the procedure
of the response to its consummation. Here the common resistance of
thing and hand opens the door to the thing to play its part in the
behavior of the organism. And it remained for Renaissance science
to isolate these measurable characteristics of the physical thing,
as the conditions for all other characters of the thing as they appear
in experience.
In immediate experience the thing is smooth or rough, is pleasant
or painful, as directly as it is resistant. Smoothness or roughness
or pleasantness or distress involve various responses carried out
toward the distant object, and these enter into the organization of
the act even though immediately inhibited. That they are not immediately
carried out means that they are organized about the prepotent response
of approach or withdrawal and subsequent reactions. My thesis is that
the resistance which this organization of the act puts upon them identifies
them as characters of the thing, though as qualities which inhere
in the physical thing as a resistant object. The surface we call smooth
calls out a tendency to stroke it, but that one may not do this until
he has reached it and got hold of it means that the actual appearance
of smoothness or pleasantness awaits the manipulatory resistance of
the physical thing. The dependence of the appearance of these characters
upon the act organized with reference to the attainment of the physical
(132) object is the organic phase of the contact
reality of the distance object. My point is that this contact reality
of the distance object asserts itself in neural organization by the
inhibition of the reaction which these characters of the distant object
call out through the organized act which realizes them. In so far
as the tendency to stroke the distant smooth object is held in check
by the organization of the act which will realize the tendency, it
is an affirmation of the conditional reality of the smoothness of
the object. If it cannot fit into the organization of such an act
we dismiss it as illusory; e.g., the apparent wetness of the shimmer
above the desert sand cannot be fitted into the act of going to and
drinking the illusory water. It is the acceptance of inhibitions involved
in the organized attitude of approach that confers these qualities
upon the distant object. The resistances involved in organization
lead up to processes that are aroused before they can be realized
and which yet can determine the form of the act which completes them.
The development of the head, and of the cerebrum as the seat of the
distance senses, has given to the organism the two fundamental characters
that belong to mind. It has brought about the anticipatory arousal
of reactions that can only be realized upon the accomplishment of
the reaction of the body to its immediate resistances in reaching
its goal. In the organization of the act so that these aroused but
uncompleted reactions may be fulfilled it has introduced the future
into the mechanism of the act, and the conditioning of the present
and future by each other. Again, it has made possible the excitement
within the organism of that resistance of the physical thing which
is common to thing and organism. The physical thing external to the
organism can call out its own response and the answering reaction
of the organism, In the form of spatially defined resistance the action
of the distant object is present in the responses of the (133)
organism, with its value in exciting the appropriate reactions of
the organism. In the form of a response the distant object is present
in the conduct of the organism. Furthermore, other characters of the
object, dependent for their realization upon the carrying out of an
organic act, become, through the organization of the responses to
them into the act and the acceptance of its control, ways in which
the object appears in the conduct of the organism. The object can
thus appear in experience through the reaction of the organism to
it, given the mechanism of the upper nervous system. It is there in
the values it will have, reflected in the responses of the organism;
but it is there in advance of the responses. And it is because the
objects are there that the organism can become an object itself in
its experience.
B. There is a characteristic difference between the so-called primary
and the secondary qualities. The stuff of matter appears in the primary
qualities of extension, effective occupation of space and mobility.
These answer in our experience to what has been called by Newton the
quantity of matter. This appears in immediate experience of the spatial
resistance of the body. It appears in momentum. At least this is experience
of the object as offering extended resistance, of our own bodies acquiring
momentum, of the effort necessary to set a massive body in motion
and to change its state of motion. Extension, volume, and resistance
to change of rest or motion, these cannot be exactly defined in terms
of our sensuous experience, but they are characters which enable us
to put ourselves inside of the physical object. Its resistance is
equal to ours. It feels the same. In the case of the secondary qualities
the characters which appear in our vision, hearing, tasting and smelling
cannot be shared with the characters in the physical object which
they answer to. It is not by being red, or salt, or noisy, or (134)
redolent that the organism finds itself in relation with objects having
these characters. It is by resisting that the organism is in relationship
with resistant objects. If we seek for the biological mechanism of
this experience, as we do for that of the other so-called senses,
we find it in the resistances which the different parts of the organism
present to each other. The hand, notably, presses against different
parts of the body, and they, in response to that pressure, resist
it. When one presses against the surface of a table he has the same
experience as when he presses against his hand, except for the absence
of the response of resisting the pressure of the other hand. But there
is a common content there, by means of which the organism later passes
over into the insides of things. In no other sensuous experience do
we pass over into the thing. It can affect us by its color, odor,
flavor or temperature, but the relation does not set up in us the
character of the object. Resistance, or the effective occupation of
space, Locke's "solidity," has in experience a common character,
as Locke felt, which is both in the individual and in outer things.
If we state it in terms of an "idea," of a sensation in
the mind, the whole affair, external effect as well as internal feeling,
is shut up in the mind, where Berkeley placed it, and where Hume left
it to be dispersed with the other impressions of the mind. What calls
for further analysis than the psychology of their period admitted
is that phase of the physical thing which I have referred to as its
inside. This term does not refer to the new surfaces discovered by
subdivision of the thing. It does involve that unity of the thing
which Kant and his idealistic followers located in the judging process;
but it involves more than this-viz., an element of activity, expressed
in the term resistance. When one hand presses against the
other, each hand resists the other from the inside. As I have said,
when the hand presses against a table there is an element in the (135)
resistance of the table that is identical with what we find in the
mutual resistance of the two hands; but while the table resists the
hand as effectually as does the other hand, the resistance of the
table, taken as an abstracted experience, lacks the character of activity
that belongs to the pressure of the opposing hand. Yet it requires
an abstraction to take this character out of the table. To say that
we put this character into the thing, whose mass or inertia resists
forces acting upon it, means either going back to a doctrine of consciousness
of stuff which separates the individual from physical things rather
than interrelates him with them, or else it ignores the fact that
the individual's organism comes into experience only as other objects
define and orient it. Nor are we justified in assuming that an individual
locates an inside within himself before he does in other things. It
ought to be sufficiently evident, though it is in fact quite generally
overlooked, that we become physical things no sooner than do the objects
that surround us, and that we anatomize ourselves, as Russell has
recently pointed out, only as we anatomize others. But it is possible
to recognize in the evolution of the neo-pallium a mechanism by which
higher organisms can live in an environment occupied by physical things,
including themselves, all of which have insides. Undoubtedly a response
from an inside must come from the organism and not from the physical
thing outside it, but it cannot be located within the organism until
the organism has been defined by its interrelations with other things.
What the extensive development of the cerebrum has made possible
is the innervation and organization of responses in advance of their
execution. When an organism endowed with such organs finds its hand
pressing against a resistant object, there will be an experience common
to the pressure of the object and of the other hand, and there will
(136) be also a stimulus to respond with answering
pressure just as the other hand would respond. The organism has stimulated
itself, by its action on an object, to act upon itself in the fashion
of the other object. To an animal whose central nervous system includes
only a spinal column and a brain stem, whose responses, therefore,
take place without delay, such a tendency to react to its own reaction
to an object would be incongruous and meaningless. To an animal, whose
exteroceptors put it into relation with the object from afar, and
whose neo-pallium enables it to start and organize its responses in
advance of satisfying or dangerous contact, it is of immense advantage
to be able to act in a manner in the place of the distant object and
thus to be ready for its own subsequent reaction. Where the action
of other things upon us is in some degree identical with responses
of our own, so that the beginning of our action upon them can stimulate
us to call out in our organisms delayed response that puts us in their
attitudes, they can become objects to us at the same time that we
can become objects to ourselves, since we are approaching our own
later action from the point of view of the other. For we can never
become selves unless the action in which we are involved includes
action toward our own organisms. Undoubtedly to become conscious selves
the mechanism of communication is necessary, but the matrix for communication
is the stimulation we give to ourselves to act as those upon whom
we are acting will act.
There are then two characters of the physical thing, if we regard
it from the standpoint of the genesis of experience as we find it
in the individual, and as we infer it to have taken place in the early
history of the human community. The first character is that of the
continuity of the experience of pressure in the organism and of resistance
in the physical object. The experience of the organism in its contact
with (137) the physical object is the pressure which
is the character of the physical object. This, as we have seen, distinguishes
the contact experience from the experiences of so-called secondary
qualities. What is experienced is the resistance of the physical thing,
and the experience of this resistance is itself resistance in the
organism. As the expression, "experience of," carries with
it dangerous implications it is better to state the proposition in
this manner: that in contact experience the resistant character of
the object is identical with the resistant character of the organism;
while in distance experience the character of the object is in no
way present in the organism. The second character the object undoubtedly
borrows from the organism, in becoming an object, that of actually
or potentially acting upon the organism from within itself. I have
also called this character that of "having an inside." It
is the character of resistance identical in the organism and in the
object that opens the door to this borrowing. To take the attitude
of pressing against an object is to arouse in the organism the attitude
of counter-pressure. This is a fundamental attitude reflected also
in Newton's law of action and reaction. There must be an action of
the object equal to the action of the organism upon it, in order that
it may be in our experience a physical thing. In grasping the object,
in pushing it, in leaning against it, in any manipulation of it, the
object must come back upon the organism with equal resistance, if
it is to be and maintain itself as a thing. Psychological analysis
has here used the term "kinaesthetic imagery," and aesthetic
analysis has referred to it as "empathy." We see the object
not simply as offering passive resistance, but as actively resisting
us. But the fundamental importance of these facts for the emergence
of the physical object in experience has not, I think, been recognized.
It is easily overlooked, because the attitude of the thing's response
to pressure is identical with
(138) that of the organism, though opposite in direction.
This opposition reveals itself in the appearance of the organism as
a physical object. Such an object can only appear when the organism
has taken the attitude of acting toward itself, and the invitation
to this is found in the fact that we have stimulated ourselves by
our attitude toward the physical thing to respond in pressure as the
thing responds.
There are two matters to be considered here. One is the relatively
late abstraction of the physical object from the social object and
the necessity that the organism take the attitude of the other in
order to become an object to himself. The other is the structure of
space in our experience. This finds its expression in the Cartesian
coordinates and in the preservation of the identical structure no
matter where the origin of the system is placed. It is the first item
in Newtonian relativity. In our perceptual space an individual finds
the center of the system within himself, and the coordinates extend
up and down, to right and left and before and behind him. They are
organically given in his bilateral symmetry and his maintenance of
his erect position over against a distant object in the line of vision.
What I wish to point out is that perceptual space involves something
more than this orientation. Distortions of distant visual space are
corrected in perception to a very considerable degree. We see things
in the dimensions and structure of the manipulatory area. That is,
we extend to them the space of the manipulatory area. Now evidently
this can only be accomplished in immediate experience if there is
in perception a mechanism for taking the attitude of the distant object.
It is the sight of the distant physical thing that stimulates the
organism to take its attitude of resistance, which is the import of
seeing a hard thing. The sight of a physical thing anywhere in our
field of perception locates us there as well as where we are, and,
indeed, because it (139) locates us where we are.
Over and above the tendency to move toward or away from the distant
object, immediate location in perceptual space implies the presence
of a thing at the point, and the presence of a thing beyond the stimulation
to approach or move away involves the character of action of the thing
at the point-its active resistance, borrowed, as I have said, from
the responses of the organism.
Endnotes
- Sections (A) and (B) in this Essay are parallel accounts taken
from two different manuscripts.
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Gordon Ward and Robert
Throop
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