w my divergence from Professor Cohen becomes more marked. He
continues with the following example (p. 622): "Our neighbor M. is tall,
modest, cheerful, and we understand a banker. His tallness, modesty,
cheerfulness, and the fact that he is a banker we usually regard as his
qualities; the fact that he is our neighbor is a relation which he seems
to bear to us. He may move his residence, cease to be our neighbor, and
yet remain the same person with the same qualities. If, however, I
become his tailor, his tallness becomes translated into certain
relations of measurement; if I become his social companion, his modesty
means that he will stand in certain social relations with me, etc." In
other words, we are illustrating the doctrine that "qualities are
reducible to relations" (cf. p. 623). This doctrine I cannot quite
accept without modification, for I cannot tell what it means. Without
any presuppositions as to subjectivity or consciousness (cf. p. 623,
(a).) there are in the world as I know it certain colored objects--let
the expression be taken naively to avoid idealistico-realistic
discussion which is here irrelevant. Now it is as unintelligible to me
that the red flowers and green leaves of the geraniums before my windows
should be reducible to mere relations in any existential sense, as it
would be to ask for the square root of their odor, though of course it
is quite intelligible that the physical theory and predictions
concerning green and red surfaces (or odors) should be stated in terms
of atomic distances and ether vibrations of specific lengths. The
scientific conception is, after all, nothing more than an indication of
how to take hold of things and manipulate them to get foreseen results,
and its entities are real things only in the sense that they are the
practically effective keynotes of the complex reality. Accordingly,
instead of reducing qualities to relations, it seems to me a much more
intelligible view to consider relations as abstract ways of taking
qualities in general, as qualities thought of in their function of
bridging a gap or making a transition between two bits of reality that
have previously been taken as separate things. Indeed, it is just
because things are not ontologically independent beings (but rather
selections from genuinely concatenated existence) that relations become
important as indications of the practical significance of qualitative
continuities which have been neglected in the p