Let us call the reader's attention to another case in which we find an essential difference between "two kinds of abstraction". That they simply must be different is once more evidenced by this: one of them is wonderfully compatible with the simplicity of a child's mind. Thus it proves to be immediate and natural. The other is farfetched and artificial, rather than naive and natural. Therefore no genuine child has ever wasted a minute of his time trying to catch hold of it.
We have been struck by the failure in some of the most acute and eminent reviewers of philosophical history to pay any attention to this essential distinction.
Love-joy, after his masterful historical description of what one might almost be tempted to call the breakdown of the "Revolt against Dualism" in our century (discussed later in this work), gives a brief discussion, at the end of his book, about memory as an evidence of epistemological dualism in almost any man's mind.
In all kinds of retrospective mental activity there is obviously a conscious and intrinsic reference to a reality other than the content given.
Of course, merely to perceive a thing does not necessarily imply that the perceiver must be conscious of a duality between what is actually perceived by the senses and what--objectively, as the scientific phrase goes--should have been perceived, if the perceiver in question had been able to reach the underlying "scientific reality" of his perception. At least we definitely know the ordinary child to be perfectly undisturbed by any philosophical troubles of that order.
And now what about simple remembrance--when you call back to your mind in the present what really happened in the past? Well, Lovejoy claims that this is a case of "dualism", affecting even the child's mind. In fact, in his opinion, a certain epistemological dualism is inevitable to any man in this case.
Let us accept his suggestion so far: a person brings to mind the look of a dog he owned way back in his childhood. Here there is something of a "canine sort" immediately present to--and therefore compresent with--his consciousness. But that is certainly not the dog of flesh and blood which, in those bygone days, used to stand right in front of him, and has since caused that very picture in his memory. In fact, any kind of retrospection is a "case in which the duality of the (concrete) datum and the thing (imaginatively) known is immediately manifest". And everyone who says "I remember", using those words in their natural familiar sense, is "bearing witness to the possibility of a mediate and representative knowledge".[1] The grown-up man who looks back at this childhood memories is perfectly aware of the fact that it is a matter of "two different dogs" as it were.
In other words, Lovejoy points out nothing less than a sort of common human "dualism" here between the actually existent object and the imaginal object of memory!
But, from the viewpoint of totality in human life, there must certainly be an infinite distance from that dualism (if one insists upon calling it dualism) to the classical epistemological dualism (between the socalled "real" object of science and the immediately perceived object of our everyday experience). The latter is a dualism we have qualified as disruptive, whereas we would never venture to apply any such negative epithet to the former. Are we right or wrong in treating the two so differently?
Once more the child's reaction becomes, to us, the most reliable criterion available to us. Does the child's behaviour indicate that his mind undergoes some kind of disruption at the moment of that mysterious transition--from, on one hand, a "diving down" into the "dreamland" of memories, to, on the other hand, a "merging up" into the "realistic country" of objective knowledge and historical facts? Or also, of course, is it not possible that he may travel in the opposite direction?
Now, in children there is obviously no lack of vivid imaginary pictures of past events they have experienced. The child actually portrays, right in front of him, the cute dog he happened to meet some time ago. But our question should be, of course: How does he react at the moment when you have the pedantic sternness of "calling his mind back to order"; that is of cutting short his "dreams", saying, "Come here, my boy, you do realize, after all, that no dog is actually standing right there in front of you any longer--excitedly barking and wagging his tail as you describe him. That dog has been dead for two years now!
Will that boy be scandalized at your sudden intervention as a representative of sober-minded realism and stern historicity? Not in the least. You may haul him out from his "mood of memories" without any risk of being looked upon as a pedant for that matter, or as in any way an unreasonable person, or as a downright nuisance. No--no, for you see that boy is a passionate realist in spite of his dreams. In fact, reality has an appeal to him just as strong as his "dreams". So he is prepared at any moment to render a spontaneous account of his "duplicity". He will inform you that he does distinguish, himself already, perfectly well between "two dogs": on one hand the dog in flesh and blood he saw with his real eyes two years ago, and, on the other, the dog he sees with his "mnemonic eye" today. We said, "He distinguishes": to be sure, in his moments of stern realism he does. For although the "play mood" part of him has a dog still, whom his prolific memory, or daydream, loves to fondle as being there right now, he can merge into the realms of reality at a moment's notice, and without any visible pain. In fact, there is astonishingly little of either painful resentment or stubborn refutation in his attitude towards the sudden call back to the realms of an "outward reality", the glaring world of "daylight facts".
But now please pass on to a very different experiment with the same child: put into the arsenal of your attack against his sound mind, the epistemological doubts of subtle philosophy. Just try to insinuate into his thinking the weird idea, devised by speculative philosophy and pure science, that the dog he sees right in front of him, the dog in flesh and blood--"is not, perhaps, the real dog at all"!
What will be your boy's immediate reaction to that onslaught? The most probable bet is that the same child will then look at you with an air of sincere surprise, maybe active disapproval, also. Perhaps some real confusion will be the final sum of his reaction, as he asks himself the following question: Is this serious-looking adult, standing in front of me, just making a good joke? Or is he somewhat "off the beam"? Or, is he just wickedly planning to make a fool of me?
We have brought in the matter of epistemological dualism just in order to point out what the child's playful deviation from the realms of stern realism is not like. If this is the weird way grown-up persons "play", when they feel like taking some moments off from the greyness of everyday truth, then what is the play of the real player, the little child, like? In fact, the images his mind produces in his play, properly speaking, are not greatly different from those produced in his memories. Of course, one may call the process taking place in either case an "abstraction". But then one must not forget that this abstraction differs widely from that of the philosopher or of the pure scientist in one important respect: it has the property of completing (complementing) the person's totality. It never tended to break that totality up. The deepest spirit of the child's play is hardly ever at war with his spirit of reality. One is rather just a complement to the other, and the transitions are remarkable in their gentleness.
One peculiarity seems to stand out particularly in the viability "mechanism" of soundly childlike minds, or "naive" minds, regardless of sex and age: their fancies and peculiar type of "day-dreams" will often help them wonderfully to just "play the game"; in this we do not fail to include "the game of life", which does not, otherwise, have the reputation of being just a "child's play", does it? Occasionally that "second department" of the childlike person's world (his "world of the play") may be seen to include the strangest "stuff", or what natural science would call "strange stuff" anyway. It may be peopled with personae in the original sense of "actors on the scene", for instance a beloved relative, perhaps one that has been dead for years; but in the sublunary world of memories he is still wonderfully alive. According to the elementary rules of the "game", he is right there. And mystery of mysteries: the influence this imaginary person exerts in the authentic life of the "player", or "dreamer", may be of an impressive realism, indeed.
But notice, above all, this little detail, which does not apply to any type of spiritualism: in spite of all those phantasms, put on the stage by an adult who has never ceased to play his childlike game, this eternally youthful player will still keep at abeyance, for full presentation at a moment's notice, the perfect awareness of "another reality". The relative who died, is really dead, after all, with all that death actually implies to any unshakable realist!
The same "duplicity" obviously holds true for the fancy games of the little child, properly speaking, in that he too keeps at constant abeyance--in some "other layer" of his consciousness, as it were--"another world", a real world, and real in a different way. And that "differently real" world proves to be there, at the very outskirts of his world of dream or play. It actually seems to keep bordering on the world of dream and play all along. In all events, at the briefest delay, he can plunge himself into the cold waters of the "more real" reality. The change (or waking up) is perpetrated without the slightest hesitation, nor the slightest confusion, for that young "jongleur of the two worlds" never mistakes one for the other. On the contrary he wanders with the sure step of a somnambulist back and forth between them. His passing from one to the other happens with the masterfulness, or rather the nonchalance with which other people change their shirts. Briefly stated, as far as we can see, there is not much in that "dualism" there that betrays any serious disintegration. There is not the faintest risk of any fateful disruption.
So let us rather speak about a perfectly natural human duality, strikingly integrated in the basic structure of every sound totality characterizing the Child. And let us particularly notice: simply nowhere, even in the deepest recesses of this childish mind, will the researcher find any place for a perturbing doubt about man's ability to grasp the essential reality of the world surrounding him, to grasp it with his common senses here and now.
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