Science, "reason" is not therefore something laid from above upon
experience. Suggested and tested in experience, it is also employed
through inventions in a thousand ways to expand and enrich experience.
Although, as has been so often repeated, this self-creation and
self-regulation of experience is still largely technological rather than
truly artistic or human, yet what has been achieved contains the
guaranty of the possibility of an intelligent administering of
experience. The limits are moral and intellectual, due to defects in our
good will and knowledge. They are not inherent metaphysically in the
very nature of experience. "Reason" as a faculty separate from
experience, introducing us to a superior region of universal truths
begins now to strike us as remote, uninteresting and unimportant.
Reason, as a Kantian faculty that introduces generality and regularity
into experience, strikes us more and more as superfluous--the
unnecessary creation of men addicted to traditional formalism and to
elaborate terminology. Concrete suggestions arising from past
experiences, developed and matured in the light of the needs and
deficiencies of the present, employed as aims and methods of specific
reconstruction, and tested by success or failure in accomplishing this
task of readjustment, suffice. To such empirical suggestions used in
constructive fashion for new ends the name intelligence is given.
This recognition of the place of active and planning thought within the
very processes of experience radically alters the traditional status of
the technical problems of particular and universal, sense and reason,
perceptual and conceptual. But the alteration is of much more than
technical significance. For reason is experimental intelligence,
conceived after the pattern of science, and used in the creation of
social arts; it has something to do. It liberates man from the bondage
of the past, due to ignorance and accident hardened into custom. It
projects a better future and assists man in its realization. And its
operation is always subject to test in experience. The plans which are
formed, the principles which man projects as guides of reconstructive
action, are not dogmas. They are hypotheses to be worked out in
practice, and to be rejected, corrected and expanded as they fail or
succeed in giving our present experience the guidance it requires. We
may call them programmes of action, but since they are to be used in
making our future acts less blind, more directed, they are flexible.
Intelligence is not something possessed once for all. It is in constant
process of forming, and its retention requires constant alertness in
observing consequences, an open-minded will to learn and courage in
re-adjustment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account