44
PARTISAN REVIE1T
affairs owe their existence not only to the objects they are com·
monly believed to qualify, but also to complicated mechanisms
(including physiological ones) of which common-sense is fre·
quently unaware. But it does not follow that these qualities are
therefore constituted out of some "mental stuff," or that a "mind"
(in the sense of a disembodied, experimentally unidentifiable
agent) is required for bringing them into existence. Whatever the
conditions may be for the occurrence of colors, for example, ex–
perience shows extended
surfaces
to be colored; and if it is held
that colors are "mental," traits (such as that of being extended)
must be attributed to the mind which are the presumptive dis·
tinguishing marks of physical objects. In that case, however, what
becomes of the notion of mind as a disembodied entity? But
dialectic aside, there is no shred of evidence that in addition to
complicated physico-organic processes any other "agents" are re·
quired to produce the qualitative manifolds of experience. Th&
postulation of an additional agent (held to be something dis–
tinctively "mental") is on par with the caprice of endowing the
planets with souls in order to account for their motions. The
actual procedures of the natural sciences thus offer no ground
for the alleged dualism between the mental and the physical; and
accordingly, even the semblance of a reason disappears for limit–
ing the scope of experimental techniques.
And in the third place, the "abstractness" with which natural
science is charged as a fatal weakness, is in fact a trait of all
cognition. All cognition involves the making of distinctions and
the recognition of some things as relevant and others as not; in
this sense, therefore, all cognition abstracts from its subject-matter
and prescinds those features from it which bear on the problems
at issue. To
know
the course of the planets is not to engage in
periodic journeys around the sun; to
know
the factors and condi–
tions of a human transaction is not the same as to participate in
its joys and sorrows. More generally, it is not the function of
knowledge to reproduce its own subject-matter; and to refuse to
make abstractions of any sort is to abandon knowledge in favor
of uninformed feeling and blind experience. Accordingly, just
what is the quarrel of those critics who find fault with the abstract–
ness of science? Do they seriously claim that the theories of
science are not relevant to their subject-matters? Do they main-
