n fact most of our philosophic ills,
may be traced back to the prejudice that experience or knowing is a
process in which the objects concerned do not participate and have no
share. This assumption commits us at once to various corollaries and
thus breeds a set of abstractions that pass themselves off as entities
and add themselves to the world of our experience as demonstrable facts.
In philosophy, as in the financial world, there is a constant temptation
to do business on a basis of fictitious capitalization. Our abstract
physico-chemical processes, with their correlates, such as passive,
independent objects, souls, minds, or absolutes, do not represent actual
working capital, but watered stock, and their inevitable tendency is to
convert the legitimate business of philosophy into a campaign of
exploitation, which is none the less exploitation because it is
frequently done in the interests of what are supposed to be the
spiritual values of man. A careful inventory of our assets brings to
light no such entities as those which have been placed to our credit.
We do not find body and object _and_ consciousness, but only body and
object. We do not find objects that remain indifferent to the
experiential process, but rather objects that exhibit a flexibility and
mobility which defy all description. We do not find a self-sufficient
environment or absolute _to_ which intelligence must needs adjust
itself, but an environment that is at odds with itself and struggling in
the throes of a reconstruction. The process of intelligence is something
that goes on, not in our minds, but in things; it is not photographic,
but creative. From the simplest perception to the most ideal aspiration
or the wildest hallucination, our human experience is reality engaged in
the guidance or control of behavior. Things undergo a change in becoming
experienced, but the change consists in a doing, in the assumption of a
certain task or duty. The experiential object hence varies with the
response; the situation and the motor activity fit together like the
sections of a broken bowl.

The bearing of this standpoint on the interpretation of psychology is
readily apparent. If it be granted that consciousness is just a name for
behavior that is guided by the results of acts not yet performed but
reflected beforehand in the objects of experience, it follows that this
behavior is the peculiar subject-matter of psychology. It is only by
reference to behavior t