The counterpart of classic thought which took ends, enjoyments, uses not simply as genuine termini of natural events (which they are), but as the essence and form of things independent of human experience, is a modern philosophy which makes reality purely mechanical and which regards the consequences of things in human experience as accidental or phenomenal by-products. In truth, abstraction from human experience is but a liberation from familiar and specific enjoyments, it provides means for detecting hitherto untried consequences, for invention, for the creation of new wants, and new modes of good and eveil. In any sense in which the conception of essence is legitimate, these human consequences are the esences of natural events. water still has the meanings of water of everyday experience when it becomes the essence H20, or else H20 would be totally meaningless, a mere sound, not an intelligible name. [ Dewey, 1925,pp.193-94]
This capacity of essences to enter readily into any number of new combinations, and thereby generate further meanings more profound and far reaching than those from which they sprang, gives them a semblance of independent lie and career, a semblance which is responbisble for their elevation by some thinkers into a realm separate form that of existence and superior to it. Consider the interpretations that have been based upon such essences as four, plus, the square root of minus one. These are at once so manipulable and so fertile in consequences when conjoined with others that thinkers who are primarily interested in their performances threat them not as significant terms of discourse, but as an order of entities independent of human invention and use. the fact the we can watch them and register what happens when they come together, and that the things that happen are as independent of our volition and expectation as are the discoveries of a geographic exploration, is taken as evidence that they constitute entities having subsistent Being independently not only of us but of all natural events whatever.
Alternatives are too narrowly conceived. Because meanings and essences are nto states of mind, because they are as independent of immediate sensation and imagery as are physical things, and because nevertheless they are not physical things, it is assumed that they are a peculiar kind of thing, termed metaphysical, or "logical" in a style which separates logic from nature. But there are many other things which are neither physical no psychical existences, and which are demonstrably dependent upon human association and interaction. Such things function moreover in liberating and regulating subsequent human intercourse; their essence is their contribution to making that intercourse more significant and immediately rewarding. [Dewey, 1925.pp.195-96]