The naturalist answer is that the environment
kills as well as sustains us, and that the
tendency of raw experience to extinguish the
experient himself is lessened just in the degree
in which the elements in it that have a practical
bearing upon life are analyzed out of the
continuum and verbally fixed and coupled together,
so that we may know what is in the
wind for us and get ready to react in time.
Had pure experience, the naturalist says, been
always perfectly healthy, there would never
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have arisen the necessity of isolating or verbalizing
any of its terms. We should just have
experienced inarticulately and unintellectually
enjoyed. This leaning on 'reaction' in the
naturalist account implies that, whenever we
intellectualize a relatively pure experience, we
ought to do so for the sake of redescending
to the purer or more concrete level again;
and that if an intellect stays aloft among its
abstract terms and generalized relations, and
does not reinsert itself with its conclusions into
some particular point of the immediate stream
of life, it fails to finish out its function and
leaves its normal race unrun.
Most rationalists nowadays will agree that
naturalism gives a true enough account of the
way in which our intellect arose at first, but
they will deny these latter implications.
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