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PARTISAN REVIEW
sounds and smells of the human scene are thus taken to have only a
"subjective" existence and to be the otiose by-products of the true
executive order of nature. According to the second interpretation,
currently highly fashionable, the qualities apprehended in daily
experience are the concrete and exclusive reality. It is these quali–
ties which are held to constitute the intrinsic natures of things;
and since these qualities are allegedly psychic products, it is they
which are regarded as the intelligible substance of the world. In
putting to one side the qualitative character of existence the natural
sciences are consequently preoccupied with shadowy abstractions,
which have at best only a mean practical value; and the laws
which are the outcome of scientific inquiry, far from expressing
the true nature of things, fail to grasp and convey the dynamic
reality of existence.
On either interpretation, therefore, the world is split into
two discontinuous realms. One of them, the proper domain of
natural science, is a "mysterious universe" forever foreign and
essentially unintelligible to the common experience of mankind;
the other, the locus of enjoyments and values, is the theater of
the mind's activities and creations, and is the only reality in which
mind can feel confidently at home. On either alternative, the
human scene is endowed with character so distinctive that the
procedures of the empirical sciences can provide no guide to it.
For the controlled methods of experimentation are held to be
relevant only to the realm of abstract quantity, so that the entire
field of valuation, of deliberation and moral choice, is exempted
from the norms of experimental inquiry. Qualitative reality,
which by hypothesis has an inherent connection with mind and
consciousness, must therefore be explored by techniques different
from those employed in the positive sciences; and in this realm,
claims to truth must be subjected to canons of a radically differ–
ent kind. Imagination, intuition, introspection, and modes of
emotional experience, are some of the ways which have been rec–
ommended for grasping genuine reality and for understanding
human affairs.
1
1
Two citations from recent writers will help convey the flavor of the altematiTe
methods which have been proposed.
"Imagination is more adequate to reality than reason, for reality is not rational;
therefore poetry and Teligion are better adapted to the real than the sciences. The
real is not abstract and general. It is always concrete and individual; that is the
reason why imagination alone can grasp it, whereas the intellect cannot fully conceive
