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Studies in Logical Theory

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Title: Studies in Logical Theory

Author: John Dewey


        
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                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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Transcriber's note:

      1. Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).

      2. In the mathematical expressions in this text the carat
         character represents 'raised to the power' (example:
         1+3=2^2).

      3. The original text includes Greek characters. For this
         text file version these letters have been replaced with
         their transliterations, with the exception of Greek
         letter 'pi' which is represented as [pi].





STUDIES IN LOGICAL THEORY

by

JOHN DEWEY

Professor of Philosophy

With the Co-Operation of Members and Fellows of the
Department of Philosophy

The Decennial Publications
Second Series Volume Xi







Chicago
The University of Chicago Press
1903

Copyright, 1903
By the University of Chicago




PREFACE


This volume presents some results of the work done in the matter of
logical theory in the Department of Philosophy of the University of
Chicago in the first decade of its existence. The eleven Studies are the
work of eight different hands, all, with the exception of the editor,
having at some period held Fellowships in this University, Dr. Heidel in
Greek, the others in Philosophy. Their names and present pursuits are
indicated in the Table of Contents. The editor has occasionally, though
rarely, added a footnote or phrase which might serve to connect one
Study more closely with another. The pages in the discussion of
Hypothesis, on Mill and Whewell, are by him. With these exceptions, each
writer is individually and completely responsible for his own Study.

The various Studies present, the editor believes, about the relative
amount of agreement and disagreement that is natural in view of the
conditions of their origin. The various writers have been in contact
with one another in Seminars and lecture courses in pursuit of the same
topics, and have had to do with shaping one another's views. There are
several others, not represented in this volume, who have also
participated in the evolution of the point of view herein set forth, and
to whom the writers acknowledge their indebtedness. The disagreements
proceed from the diversity of interests with which the different writers
approach the logical topic; and from the fact that the point of view in
question is still (happily) developing and showing no signs of becoming
a closed system.

If the Studies themselves do not give a fair notion of the nature and
degree of the harmony in the different writers' methods, a preface is
not likely to succeed in so doing. A few words may be in place, however,
about a matter repeatedly touched upon, but nowhere consecutively
elaborated--the more ultimate philosophical bearing of what is set
forth. All agree, the editor takes the liberty of saying, that judgment
is the central function of knowing, and hence affords the central
problem of logic; that since the act of knowing is intimately and
indissolubly connected with the like yet diverse functions of affection,
appreciation, and practice, it only distorts results reached to treat
knowing as a self-inclosed and self-explanatory whole--hence the
intimate connections of logical theory with functional psychology; that
since knowledge appears as a function within experience, and yet passes
judgment upon both the processes and contents of other functions, its
work and aim must be distinctively reconstructive or transformatory;
that since Reality must be defined in terms of experience, judgment
appears accordingly as the medium through which the consciously effected
evolution of Reality goes on; that there is no reasonable standard of
truth (or of success of the knowing function) in general, except upon
the postulate that Reality is thus dynamic or self-evolving, and, in
particular, except through reference to the specific offices which
knowing is called upon to perform in readjusting and expanding the means
and ends of life. And all agree that this conception gives the only
promising basis upon which the working methods of science, and the
proper demands of the moral life, may co-operate. All this, doubtless,
does not take us very far on the road to detailed conclusions, but it is
better, perhaps, to get started in the right direction than to be so
definite as to erect a dead-wall in the way of farther movement of
thought.

In general, the obligations in logical matters of the writers are
roughly commensurate with the direction of their criticisms. Upon the
whole, most is due to those whose views are most sharply opposed. To
Mill, Lotze, Bosanquet, and Bradley the writers then owe special
indebtedness. The editor acknowledges personal indebtedness to his
present colleagues, particularly to Mr. George H. Mead, in the Faculty
of Philosophy, and to a former colleague, Dr. Alfred H. Lloyd, of the
University of Michigan. For both inspiration and the forging of the
tools with which the writers have worked there is a pre-eminent
obligation on the part of all of us to William James, of Harvard
University, who, we hope, will accept this acknowledgment and this book
as unworthy tokens of a regard and an admiration that are coequal.




TABLE OF CONTENTS


  I. Thought and its Subject-Matter                                  1

          By JOHN DEWEY

  II. Thought and its Subject-Matter: The Antecedents of Thought    23

          By JOHN DEWEY

  III. Thought and its Subject-Matter: The Datum of Thinking        49

          By JOHN DEWEY

  IV. Thought and its Subject-Matter: The Content and
      Object of Thought                                             65

          By JOHN DEWEY

  V. Bosanquet's Theory of Judgment                                 86

          By HELEN BRADFORD THOMPSON, Ph.D., Director of the
          Psychological Laboratory of Mount Holyoke College

  VI. Typical Stages in the Development of Judgment                127

          By SIMON FRASER MCLENNAN, Ph.D., Professor of
          Philosophy in Oberlin College

  VII. The Nature of Hypothesis                                    142

          By MYRON LUCIUS ASHLEY, Ph.D., Instructor,
          American Correspondence School

  VIII. Image and Idea in Logic                                    183

          By WILLARD CLARK GORE, Ph.D., Assistant Professor
          of Psychology in the University of Chicago

  IX. The Logic of the Pre-Socratic Philosophy                     203

          By WILLIAM ARTHUR HEIDEL, Ph.D., Professor of
          Latin in Iowa College

  X. Valuation as a Logical Process                                227

          By HENRY WALDGRAVE STUART, Ph.D., Instructor in
          Philosophy in the State University of Iowa

  XI. Some Logical Aspects of Purpose                              341

          By ADDISON WEBSTER MOORE, Ph.D., Assistant Professor
          of Philosophy in the University of Chicago




I

THOUGHT AND ITS SUBJECT-MATTER: THE GENERAL PROBLEM OF LOGICAL THEORY


No one doubts that thought, at least reflective, as distinct from what
is sometimes called constitutive, thought, is derivative and secondary.
It comes after something and out of something, and for the sake of
something. No one doubts that the thinking of everyday practical life
and of science is of this reflective type. We think about; we reflect
over. If we ask what it is which is primary and radical to thought; if
we ask what is the final objective for the sake of which thought
intervenes; if we ask in what sense we are to understand thought as a
derived procedure, we are plunging ourselves into the very heart of the
logical problem: the relation of thought to its empirical antecedents
and to its consequent, truth, and the relation of truth to reality.

Yet from the naïve point of view no difficulty attaches to these
questions. The antecedents of thought are our universe of life and love;
of appreciation and struggle. We think about anything and everything:
snow on the ground; the alternating clanks and thuds that rise from
below; the relation of the Monroe Doctrine to the embroglio in
Venezuela; the relation of art to industry; the poetic quality of a
painting by Botticelli; the battle of Marathon; the economic
interpretation of history; the proper definition of cause; the best
method of reducing expenses; whether and how to renew the ties of a
broken friendship; the interpretation of an equation in hydrodynamics;
etc.

Through the madness of this miscellaneous citation there appears so much
of method: anything--event, act, value, ideal, person, or place--may be
an object of thought. Reflection busies itself alike with physical
nature, the record of social achievement, and the endeavors of social
aspiration. It is with reference to _such_ affairs that thought is
derivative; it is with reference to them that it intervenes or mediates.
Taking some part of the universe of action, of affection, of social
construction, under its special charge, and having busied itself
therewith sufficiently to meet the special difficulty presented, thought
releases that topic and enters upon further more direct experience.

Sticking for a moment to this naïve standpoint, we recognize a certain
rhythm of direct practice and derived theory; of primary construction
and of secondary criticism; of living appreciation and of abstract
description; of active endeavor and of pale reflection. We find that
every more direct primary attitude passes upon occasion into its
secondary deliberative and discursive counterpart. We find that when the
latter has done its work it passes away and passes on. From the naïve
standpoint such rhythm is taken as a matter of course. There is no
attempt to state either the nature of the occasion which demands the
thinking attitude, nor to formulate a theory of the standard by which is
judged its success. No general theory is propounded as to the exact
relationship between thinking and what antecedes and succeeds it. Much
less do we ask how empirical circumstances can generate rationality of
thought; nor how it is possible for reflection to lay claim to power of
determining truth and thereby of constructing further reality.

If we were to ask the thinking of naïve life to present, with a minimum
of theoretical elaboration, its conception of its own practice, we
should get an answer running not unlike this: Thinking is a kind of
activity which we perform at specific need, just as at other need we
engage in other sorts of activity: as converse with a friend; draw a
plan for a house; take a walk; eat a dinner; purchase a suit of
clothes; etc., etc. In general, its material is anything in the wide
universe which seems to be relevant to this need--anything which may
serve as a resource in defining the difficulty or in suggesting modes of
dealing effectively with it. The measure of its success, the standard of
its validity, is precisely the degree in which the thinking actually
disposes of the difficulty and allows us to proceed with more direct
modes of experiencing, that are forthwith possessed of more assured and
deepened value.

If we inquire why the naïve attitude does not go on to elaborate these
implications of its own practice into a systematic theory, the answer,
on its own basis, is obvious. Thought arises in response to its own
occasion. And this occasion is so exacting that there is time, as there
is need, only to do the thinking which is needed in that occasion--not
to reflect upon the thinking itself. Reflection follows so naturally
upon its appropriate cue, its issue is so obvious, so practical, the
entire relationship is so organic, that once grant the position that
thought arises in reaction to specific demand, and there is not the
particular type of thinking called logical theory because there is not
the practical demand for reflection of that sort. Our attention is taken
up with particular questions and specific answers. What we have to
reckon with is not the problem of, How can I think _überhaupt_? but, How
shall I think right _here and now_? Not what is the test of thought at
large, but what validates and confirms _this_ thought?

In conformity with this view, it follows that a generic account of our
thinking behavior, the generic account termed logical theory, arises at
historic periods in which the situation has lost the organic character
above described. The general theory of reflection, as over against its
concrete exercise, appears when occasions for reflection are so
overwhelming and so mutually conflicting that specific adequate
response in thought is blocked. Again, it shows itself when practical
affairs are so multifarious, complicated, and remote from control that
thinking is held off from successful passage into them.

Anyhow (sticking to the naïve standpoint), it is true that the stimulus
to that particular form of reflective thinking termed logical theory is
found when circumstances require the act of thinking and nevertheless
impede clear and coherent thinking in detail; or when they occasion
thought and then prevent the results of thinking from exercising
directive influence upon the immediate concerns of life. Under these
conditions we get such questions as the following: What is the relation
of rational thought to crude or unreflective experience? What is the
relation of thought to reality? What is the barrier which prevents
reason from complete penetration into the world of truth? What is it
that makes us live alternately in a concrete world of experience in
which thought as such finds not satisfaction, and in a world of ordered
thought which is yet only abstract and ideal?

It is not my intention here to pursue the line of historical inquiry
thus suggested. Indeed, the point would not be mentioned did it not
serve to fix attention upon the nature of the logical problem.

It is in dealing with this latter type of questions that logical theory
has taken a turn which separates it widely from the theoretical
implications of practical deliberation and of scientific research. The
two latter, however much they differ from each other in detail, agree in
a fundamental principle. They both assume that every reflective problem
and operation arises with reference to some _specific_ situation, and
has to subserve a _specific_ purpose dependent upon its own occasion.
They assume and observe distinct limits--limits from which and to which.
There is the limit of origin in the needs of the particular situation
which evokes reflection. There is the limit of terminus in successful
dealing with the particular problem presented--or in retiring, baffled,
to take up some other question. The query that at once faces us
regarding the nature of logical theory is whether reflection upon
reflection shall recognize these limits, endeavoring to formulate them
more exactly and to define their relationships to each other more
adequately; or shall it abolish limits, do away with the matter of
specific conditions and specific aims of thought, and discuss thought
and its relation to empirical antecedents and rational consequents
(truth) at large?

At first blush, it might seem as if the very nature of logical theory as
generalization of the reflective process must of necessity disregard the
matter of particular conditions and particular results as irrelevant.
How, the implication runs, could reflection become generalized save by
elimination of details as irrelevant? Such a conception in fixing the
central problem of logic fixes once for all its future career and
material. The essential business of logic is henceforth to discuss the
relation of thought as such to reality as such. It may, indeed, involve
much psychological material, particularly in the discussion of the
processes which antecede thinking and which call it out. It may involve
much discussion of the concrete methods of investigation and
verification employed in the various sciences. It may busily concern
itself with the differentiation of various types and forms of
thought--different modes of conceiving, various conformations of
judgment, various types of inferential reasoning. But it concerns itself
with any and all of these three fields, not on their own account or as
ultimate, but as subsidiary to the main problem: the relation of thought
as such, or at large, to reality as such, or at large. Some of the
detailed considerations referred to may throw light upon the terms under
which thought transacts its business with reality; upon, say, certain
peculiar limitations it has to submit to as best it may. Other
considerations throw light upon the ways in which thought gets at
reality. Still other considerations throw light upon the forms which
thought assumes in attacking and apprehending reality. But in the end
all this is incidental. In the end the one problem holds: How do the
specifications of thought as such hold good of reality as such? In fine,
logic is supposed to grow out of the epistemological inquiry and to lead
up to its solution.

From this point of view various aspects of logical theory are well
stated by an author whom later on we shall consider in some detail.
Lotze[1] refers to "universal forms and principles of thought which hold
good everywhere both in judging of reality and in weighing possibility,
_irrespective of any difference in the objects_." This defines the
business of _pure_ logic. This is clearly the question of thought as
such--of thought at large or in general. Then we have the question "of
how far the most complete structure of thought ... can claim to be an
adequate account of that which we seem compelled to assume as the object
and occasion of our ideas." This is clearly the question of the relation
of thought at large to reality at large. It is epistemology. Then comes
"applied logic," having to do with the actual employment of concrete
forms of thought with reference to investigation of specific topics and
subjects. This "applied" logic would, if the standpoint of practical
deliberation and of scientific research were adopted, be the sole
genuine logic. But the existence of thought _in itself_ having been
agreed upon, we have in this "applied" logic only an incidental inquiry
of how the particular resistances and oppositions which "pure" thought
meets from particular matters may best be discounted. It is concerned
with methods of investigation which obviate defects in the relationship
of thought at large to reality at large, as these present themselves
under the limitations of human experience. It deals merely with
hindrances, and with devices for overcoming them; it is directed by
considerations of utility. When we reflect that this field includes the
entire procedure of practical deliberation and of concrete scientific
research, we begin to realize something of the significance of the
theory of logic which regards the limitations of specific origination
and specific outcome as irrelevant to its main problem, which assumes an
activity of thought "pure" or "in itself," that is, "irrespective of any
difference in its objects."

This suggests, by contrast, the opposite mode of stating the problem of
logical theory. Generalization of the nature of the reflective process
certainly involves elimination of much of the specific material and
contents of the thought-situations of daily life and of critical
science. Quite compatible with this, however, is the notion that it
seizes upon _certain_ specific conditions and factors, and aims to bring
them to clear consciousness--not to abolish them. While eliminating the
particular material of particular practical and scientific pursuits,
(1) it may strive to hit upon the common denominator in the various
situations which are antecedent or primary to thought and which evoke
it; (2) it may attempt to show how typical features in the specific
antecedents of thought call out to diverse typical modes of
thought-reaction; (3) it may attempt to state the nature of the specific
consequences in which thought fulfils its career.

(1) It does not eliminate dependence upon specific occasions as
provocative of thought; but endeavors to define _what_ in the various
situations constitutes them thought-provoking. The specific occasion is
not eliminated, but insisted upon and brought into the foreground.
Consequently psychological considerations are not subsidiary incidents,
but of essential importance so far as they enable us to trace the
generation of the thought-situation. (2) So from this point of view the
various types and modes of conceiving, judging, and inference are
treated, not as qualifications of thought per se or at large, but of
thought engaged in its specific, most economic, effective response to
its own particular occasion; they are adaptations for control of
stimuli. The distinctions and classifications that have been accumulated
in "formal" logic are relevant data; but they demand interpretation from
the standpoint of use as organs of adjustment to material antecedents
and stimuli. (3) Finally the question of validity, or ultimate objective
of thought, is relevant; but is such as a matter of the specific issue
of the specific career of a thought-function. All the typical
investigatory and verificatory procedures of the various sciences are
inherently concerned as indicating the ways in which thought actually
brings itself to its own successful fulfilment in dealing with various
types of problems.

While the epistemological type of logic may, as we have seen, leave
(under the name of applied logic), a subsidiary place open for the
instrumental type, the type which deals with thinking as a specific
procedure relative to a specific antecedent occasion and to a subsequent
specific fulfilment, is not able to reciprocate the favor. From its
point of view, an attempt to discuss the antecedents, data, forms, and
objective of thought, apart from reference to particular position
occupied, and particular part played in the growth of experience is to
reach results which are not so much either true or false as they are
radically meaningless--because they are considered apart from limits.
Its results are not only abstractions (for all theorizing ends in
abstractions), but abstractions without possible reference or bearing.
From this point of view, the taking of something, whether that something
be thinking activity, its empirical condition, or its objective goal,
apart from the limits of a historic or developing situation, is the
essence of _metaphysical_ procedure--in the sense of metaphysics which
makes a gulf between it and science.

As the reader has doubtless anticipated, it is the object of this
chapter to present the problem and industry of reflective thought from
this latter point of view. I recur again to the standpoint of naïve
experience, using the term in a sense wide enough to cover both
practical procedure and concrete scientific research. I resume by saying
that this point of view knows no fixed distinction between the empirical
values of unreflective life and the most abstract process of rational
thought. It knows no fixed gulf between the highest flight of theory and
control of the details of practical construction and behavior. It
passes, according to the occasion and opportunity of the moment, from
the attitude of loving and struggling and doing to that of thinking and
the reverse. Its contents or material shift their values back and forth
from technological or utilitarian to æsthetic, ethic, or affectional. It
utilizes data of perception or of discursive ideation as need calls,
just as an inventor now utilizes heat, now mechanical strain, now
electricity, according to the demands set by his aim. From this point of
view, more definite logical import is attached to our earlier statements
(p. 2) regarding the possibility of taking anything in the universe of
experience as subject-matter of thought. Anything from past experience
may be taken which appears to be an element in either the statement or
the solution of the present problem. Thus we understand the coexistence
without contradiction of an indeterminate possible field and a limited
actual field. The undefined set of means becomes specific through
reference to an end.

In all this, there is no difference of kind between the methods of
science and those of the plain man. The difference is the greater
control in science of the statement of the problem, and of the
selection and use of relevant material, both sensible or ideational. The
two are related to each other just as the hit-or-miss, trial-and-error
inventions of uncivilized man stand to the deliberate and consecutively
persistent efforts of a modern inventor to produce a certain complicated
device for doing a comprehensive piece of work. Neither the plain man
nor the scientific inquirer is aware, as he engages in his reflective
activity, of any transition from one sphere of existence to another. He
knows no two fixed worlds--reality on one side and mere subjective ideas
on the other; he is aware of no gulf to cross. He assumes uninterrupted,
free, and fluid passage from ordinary experience to abstract thinking,
from thought to fact, from things to theories and back again.
Observation passes into development of hypothesis; deductive methods
pass to use in description of the particular; inference passes into
action with no sense of difficulty save those found in the particular
task in question. The fundamental assumption is _continuity_ in and of
experience.

This does not mean that fact is confused with idea, or observed datum
with voluntary hypothesis, theory with doing, any more than a traveler
confuses land and water when he journeys from one to the other. It
simply means that each is placed and used with reference to service
rendered the other, and with reference to future use of the other.

Only the epistemological spectator is aware of the fact that the
everyday man and the scientific man in this free and easy intercourse
are rashly assuming the right to glide over a cleft in the very
structure of reality. This fact raises a query not favorable to the
epistemologist. Why is it that the scientific man, who is constantly
plying his venturous traffic of exchange of facts for ideas, of theories
for laws, of real things for hypotheses, should be so wholly unaware of
the radical and generic (as distinct from specific) difficulty of the
undertakings in which he is engaged? We thus come afresh to our inquiry:
Does not the epistemological logician unwittingly transfer the specific
difficulty which always faces the scientific man--the difficulty in
detail of correct and adequate translation back and forth of _this_ set
of facts and _this_ group of ideas--into a totally different problem of
the wholesale relation of thought at large with reality in general? If
such be the case, it is clear that the very way in which the
epistemological type of logic states the problem of thinking, in
relation both to empirical antecedents and to objective truth, makes
that problem insoluble. Working terms, terms which as working are
flexible and historic, relative, are transformed into absolute, fixed,
and predetermined forms of being.

We come a little closer to the problem when we recognize that every
scientific inquiry passes historically through at least four stages.
(_a_) The first of these stages is, if I may be allowed the bull, that
in which scientific inquiry does not take place at all, because no
problem or difficulty in the quality of the experience has presented
itself to provoke reflection. We have only to cast our eye back from the
existing status of any science, or back from the status of any
particular topic in any science, to discover a time when no reflective
or critical thinking busied itself with the matter--when the facts and
relations were taken for granted and thus were lost and absorbed in the
value which accrued from the experience. (_b_) After the dawning of the
problem, there comes a period of occupation with relatively crude and
unorganized facts--the hunting for, locating, and collecting of raw
material. This is the empiric stage, which no existing science, however
proud in its attained rationality, can disavow as its own progenitor.
(_c_) Then there is also a speculative stage: a period of guessing, of
making hypotheses, of framing ideas which later on are labeled and
condemned as only ideas. There is a period of distinction and
classification-making which later on is regarded as only
mentally-gymnastic in character. And no science, however proud in its
present security of experimental assurance, can disavow a scholastic
ancestor. (_d_) Finally, there comes a period of fruitful interaction
between the mere ideas and the mere facts: a period when observation is
determined by experimental conditions depending upon the use of certain
guiding conceptions; when reflection is directed and checked at every
point by the use of experimental data, and by the necessity of finding
such form for itself as will enable it to serve as premise in a
deduction leading to evolution of new meanings, and ultimately to
experimental inquiry, which brings to light new facts. In the emerging
of a more orderly and significant region of fact, and of a more coherent
and self-luminous system of meaning, we have the natural limit of
evolution of the logic of a given science.

But consider what has happened in this historic record. Unanalyzed
experience has broken up into distinctions of facts and ideas; the
factual side has been developed by indefinite and almost miscellaneous
descriptions and cumulative listings; the conceptual side has been
developed by unchecked and speculative elaboration of definitions,
classifications, etc. There has been a relegation of accepted meanings
to the limbo of mere ideas; there has been a passage of some of the
accepted facts into the region of mere hypothesis and opinion.
Conversely, there has been a continued issuing of ideas from the region
of hypotheses and theories into that of facts, of accepted objective and
meaningful contents. Out of a world of only _seeming_ facts, and of only
_doubtful_ ideas, there emerges a universe continually growing in
definiteness, order, and luminosity.

This progress, verified in every record of science, is an absolute
monstrosity from the standpoint of the epistemology which assumes a
thought in general, on one side, and a reality in general, on the other.
The reason that it does not present itself as such a monster and miracle
to those actually concerned with it is because there is a certain
_homogeneity_ or _continuity_ of reference and of use which controls all
diversities in both the modes of existence specified and the grades of
value assigned. The distinction of thought and fact is treated in the
growth of a science, or of any particular scientific problem, as an
_induced_ and _intentional_ practical division of labor; as relative
assignments of position with reference to performance of a task; as
deliberate distribution of forces at command for their more economic
use. The interaction of bald fact and hypothetical idea into the outcome
of a single world of scientific apprehension and comprehension is but
the successful achieving of the aim on account of which the distinctions
in question were instituted.

Thus we come back to the problem of logical theory. To take the
distinctions of thought and fact, etc., as ontological, as inherently
fixed in the make-up of the structure of being, is to treat the actual
development of scientific inquiry and scientific control as a mere
subsidiary topic ultimately of only utilitarian worth. It is also to
state the terms upon which thought and being transact business in a way
so totally alien to the use made of these distinctions in concrete
experience as to create a problem which can be discussed only in terms
of itself--not in terms of the conduct of life--metaphysics again in the
bad sense of that term. As against this, the problem of a logic which
aligns itself with the origin and employ of reflective thought in
everyday life and in critical science, is to follow the natural history
of thinking as a life-process having its own generating antecedents and
stimuli, its own states and career, and its own specific objective or
limit.

This point of view makes it possible for logical theory to come to terms
with psychology.[2] When logic is considered as having to do with the
wholesale activity of thought per se, the question of the historic
process by which this or that particular thought came to be, of how its
object happens to present itself as sensation, or perception, or
conception, is quite irrelevant. These things are mere temporal
accidents. The psychologist (not lifting his gaze from the realm of the
changeable) may find in them matters of interest. His whole industry is
just with natural history--to trace series of psychical events as they
mutually excite and inhibit one another. But the logician, we are told,
has a deeper problem and an outlook of more unbounded horizon. He deals
with the question of the eternal nature of thought and its eternal
validity in relation to an eternal reality. He is concerned, not with
genesis, but with value, not with a historic cycle, but with absolute
distinctions and relations.

Still the query haunts us: Is this so in truth? Or has the logician of a
certain type arbitrarily made it thus by taking his terms apart from
reference to the specific occasions in which they arise and situations
in which they function? If the latter, then the very denial of historic
relationship and of the significance of historic method, is indicative
only of the unreal character of his own abstraction. It means in effect
that the affairs under consideration have been isolated from the
conditions in which alone they have determinable meaning and assignable
worth. It is astonishing that, in the face of the advance of the
evolutionary method in natural science, any logician can persist in the
assertion of a rigid difference between the problem of origin and of
nature; between genesis and analysis; between history and validity. Such
assertion simply reiterates as final a distinction which grew up and
had meaning in pre-evolutionary science. It asserts against the most
marked advance which scientific method has yet made a survival of a
crude period of logical scientific procedure. We have no choice save
either to conceive of thinking as a response to a specific stimulus, or
else to regard it as something "in itself," having just in and of itself
certain traits, elements, and laws. If we give up the last view, we must
take the former.

The entire significance of the evolutionary method in biology and social
history is that every distinct organ, structure, or formation, every
grouping of cells or elements, has to be treated as an instrument of
adjustment or adaptation to a particular environing situation. Its
meaning, its character, its value, is known when, and only when, it is
considered as an arrangement for meeting the conditions involved in some
specific situation. This analysis of value is carried out in detail by
tracing successive stages of development--by endeavoring to locate the
particular situation in which each structure has its origin, and by
tracing the successive modifications through which, in response to
changing media, it has reached its present conformation.[3] To persist
in condemning natural history from the standpoint of what natural
history meant before it identified itself with an evolutionary process
is not so much to exclude the natural-history standpoint from
philosophic consideration as it is to evince ignorance of what it
signifies.

Psychology as the natural history of the various attitudes and
structures through which experiencing passes, as an account of the
conditions under which this or that state emerges, and of the way in
which it influences, by stimulation or inhibition, production of other
states or conformations of consciousness, is indispensable to logical
evaluation, the moment we treat logical theory as an account of
thinking as a mode of adaptation to its own generating conditions, and
judge its validity by reference to its efficiency in meeting its
problems. The historical point of view describes the sequence; the
normative follows the sequence to its conclusion, and then turns back
and judges each historical step by viewing it in reference to its own
outcome.[4]

In the course of changing experience we keep our balance as we move from
situations of an affectional quality to those which are practical or
appreciative or reflective, because we bear constantly in mind the
context in which any particular distinction presents itself. As we
submit each characteristic function and situation of experience to our
gaze, we find it has a dual aspect. Wherever there is striving there are
obstacles; wherever there is affection there are persons who are
attached; wherever there is doing there is accomplishment; wherever
there is appreciation there is value; wherever there is thinking there
is material-in-question. We keep our footing as we move from one
attitude to another, from one characteristic quality to another, because
we know the position occupied in the whole growth by the particular
function in which we are engaged, and the position within the function
of the particular element that engages us.

The distinction _between_ each attitude and function and its predecessor
and successor is serial, dynamic, operative. The distinctions _within_
any given operation or function are structural, contemporaneous, and
distributive. Thinking follows, we will say, striving, and doing follows
thinking. Each in the fulfilment of its own function inevitably calls
out its successor. But coincident, simultaneous, and correspondent
_within_ doing, is the distinction of doer and of deed; _within_ the
function of thought, of thinking and material thought upon; within the
function of striving, of obstacle of aim, of means and end. We keep our
paths straight because we do not confuse the sequential, efficient, and
functional relationship of types of experience with the contemporaneous,
correlative, and structural distinctions of elements within a given
function. In the seeming maze of endless confusion and unlimited
shiftings, we find our way by the means of the stimulations and checks
occurring within the process we are actually engaged with. We do not
contrast or confuse a condition or state which is an element in the
formation of one operation with the status or element which is one of
the distributive terms of another function. If we do, we have at once an
insoluble, because meaningless, problem upon our hands.

Now the epistemological logician deliberately shuts himself off from
those cues and checks upon which the plain man instinctively relies, and
which the scientific man deliberately searches for and adopts as
constituting his technique. Consequently he is likely to set the sort of
object or material which has place and significance only in one of the
serial functional situations of experience, over against the active
attitude which describes part of the structural constitution of another
situation; or with equal lack of justification to assimilate terms
characteristic of different stages to one another. He sets the agent, as
he is found in the intimacy of love or appreciation, over against the
externality of the fact, as that is defined within the reflective
process. He takes the material which thought selects as its own basis
for further procedure to be identical with the significant content which
it secures for itself in the successful pursuit of its aim; and this in
turn he regards as the material which was presented at the outset, and
whose peculiarities were the express means of awakening thought. He
identifies the final deposit of the thought-function with its own
generating antecedent, and then disposes of the resulting surd by
reference to some metaphysical consideration, which remains when logical
inquiry, when science (as interpreted by him), has done its work. He
does this, not because he prefers confusion to order, or error to truth,
but simply because, when the chain of historic sequence is cut, the
vessel of thought is afloat to veer upon a sea without soundings or
moorings. There are but two alternatives: either there is an object "in
itself" of thought "in itself," or else there are a series of values
which vary with the varying functions to which they belong. If the
latter, the only way these values can be defined is by discriminating
the functions to which they belong. It is only conditions relative to a
specific period or epoch of development in a cycle of experience
which-enables one to tell what to do next, or to estimate the value and
meaning of what is already done. And the epistemological logician, in
choosing to take his question as one of thought which has its own form
just as "thought," apart from the limits of the special work it has to
do, has deprived himself of these supports and stays.

The problem of logic has a more general and a more specific phase. In
its generic form, it deals with this question: How does one type of
functional situation and attitude in experience pass out of and into
another; for example, the technological or utilitarian into the
æsthetic, the æsthetic into the religious, the religious into the
scientific, and this into the socio-ethical and so on? The more specific
question is: How does the particular functional situation termed the
reflective behave? How shall we describe it? What in detail are its
diverse contemporaneous distinctions, or divisions of labor, its
correspondent _statuses_; in what specific ways do these operate with
reference to each other so as to effect the specific aim which is
proposed by the needs of the affair?

This chapter may be brought to conclusion by reference to the more
alternate value of the logic of experience, of logic taken in its wider
sense; that is, as an account of the sequence of the various typical
functions or situations of experience in their determining relations to
one another. Philosophy, defined as such a logic, makes no pretense to
be an account of a closed and finished universe. Its business is not to
secure or guarantee any particular reality or value. _Per contra_, it
gets the significance of a method. The right relationship and adjustment
of the various typical phases of experience to one another is a problem
felt in every department of life. Intellectual rectification and control
of these adjustments cannot fail to reflect itself in an added clearness
and security on the practical side. It may be that general logic can not
become an instrument in the immediate direction of the activities of
science or art or industry; but it is of value in criticising and in
organizing the tools of immediate research in these lines. It also has
direct significance in the valuation for social or life-purposes of
results achieved in particular branches. Much of the immediate business
of life is badly done because we do not know in relation to its
congeners the organic genesis and outcome of the work that occupies us.
The manner and degree of appropriation of the values achieved in various
departments of social interest and vocation are partial and faulty
because we are not clear as to the due rights and responsibilities of
one function of experience in reference to others.

The value of research for social progress; the bearing of psychology
upon educational procedure; the mutual relations of fine and industrial
art; the question of the extent and nature of specialization in science
in comparison with the claims of applied science; the adjustment of
religious aspirations to scientific statements; the justification of a
refined culture for a few in face of economic insufficiency for the
mass--such are a few of the many social questions whose _final_ answer
depends upon the possession and use of a general logic of experience as
a method of inquiry and interpretation. I do not say that headway cannot
be made in such questions apart from the method indicated: a logic of
genetic experience. But unless we have a critical and assured view of
the juncture in which and with reference to which a given attitude or
interest arises, unless we know the service it is thereby called upon to
perform and hence the organs or methods by which it best functions in
that service, our progress is impeded and irregular. We take a part for
a whole, a means for an end, or attack wholesale some other interest
because it interferes with the deified sway of the one we have selected
as ultimate. A clear and comprehensive consensus of social conviction,
and a consequent concentrated and economical direction of effort, are
assured only as there is some way of locating the position and rôle of
each typical interest and occupation in experience. The domain of
opinion is one of conflict; its rule is arbitrary and costly. Only
intellectual method affords a substitute for opinion. The general logic
of experience can alone do for the region of social values and aims what
the natural sciences after centuries of struggle are doing for activity
in the physical realm.

This does not mean that systems of philosophy which have attempted to
state the nature either of thought and of reality at large, apart from
limits of particular crises in the growth of experience, have been
worthless--though it does mean that their industry has been somewhat
misapplied. The unfolding of metaphysical theory has made large
contributions to positive evaluations of the typical situations and
relationships of experience--even when its conscious intention has been
quite otherwise. Every system of philosophy is itself a mode of
reflection; consequently (if our main contention be true), it too has
been evoked out of specific social antecedents, and has had its use as
a response to them. It has effected something in modifying the situation
within which it found its origin. It may not have solved the problem
which it consciously put itself; in many cases we may freely admit that
the question put has afterward been found to be so wrongly put as to be
insoluble. Yet exactly the same thing is true, in precisely the same
sense, in the history of science. For this reason, if for no other, it
is impossible for the scientific man to cast the first stone at the
philosopher.

The progress of science in any branch continually brings with it a
realization that problems in their previous form of statement are
insoluble because put in terms of unreal conditions; because the real
conditions have been mixed up with mental artifacts or misconstructions.
Every science is continually learning that its supposed solutions are
only apparent, because the "solution" solves, not the actual problem,
but one which has been made up. But the very putting of the question,
the very giving of the wrong answer, induces modification of existing
intellectual habits, standpoints, and aims. Wrestling with the problem,
there is evolution of new forms of technique to control its treatment,
there is search for new facts, institution of new types of
experimentation; there is gain in the methodic control of experience.
And all this is progress. It is only the worn-out cynic, the devitalized
sensualist, and the fanatical dogmatist who interpret the continuous
change of science as proving that, since each successive statement is
wrong, the whole record is error and folly; and that the present truth
is only the error not yet found out. Such draw the moral of caring
naught for all these things, or of flying to some external authority
which will deliver once for all the fixed and unchangeable truth. But
historic philosophy even in its aberrant forms has proved a factor in
the valuation of experience; it has brought problems to light, it has
provoked intellectual conflicts without which values are only nominal;
even through its would-be absolutistic isolations, it has secured
recognition of mutual dependencies and reciprocal reinforcements. Yet if
it can define its work more clearly, it can concentrate its energy upon
its own characteristic problem: the genesis and functioning in
experience of various typical interests and occupations with reference
to one another.




II

THOUGHT AND ITS SUBJECT-MATTER: THE ANTECEDENT CONDITIONS AND CUES OF
THE THOUGHT-FUNCTION


We have discriminated logic in its wider sense, concerned with the
sequence of characteristic functions and attitudes in experience, from
logic in its stricter meaning, concerned in particular with description
and interpretation of the function of reflective thought. We must avoid
yielding to the temptation of identifying logic with either of these to
the exclusion of the other; or of supposing that it is possible to
isolate one finally from the other. The more detailed treatment of the
organs and methods of reflection cannot be carried on with security save
as we have a correct idea of the historic position of reflection in the
evolving of experience. Yet it is impossible to determine this larger
placing, save as we have a defined and analytic, as distinct from a
merely vague and gross, view of what we mean by reflection--what is its
actual constitution. It is necessary to work back and forth between the
larger and the narrower fields, transforming every increment upon one
side into a method of work upon the other, and thereby testing it. The
apparent confusion of existing logical theory, its uncertainty as to its
own bounds and limits, its tendency to oscillate from larger questions
of the inherent worth of judgment and validity of inference over to
details of scientific technique, and to translation of distinctions of
formal logic into terms of an investigatory or verificatory process, are
indications of the need of this double movement.

In the next three chapters it is proposed to take up some of the
considerations that lie on the borderland between the larger and the
narrower conceptions of logical theory. I shall discuss the _locus_ of
the function of thought, so far as such _locus_ enables us to select and
characterize some of the most fundamental distinctions, or divisions of
labor, within the reflective process. In taking up the problem of the
subject-matter of thought, I shall try to make clear that it assumes
three quite distinct forms according to the epochal moment reached in
transformation of experience; and that continual confusion and
inconsistency are introduced when these respective meanings are not
identified and described according to their respective geneses and
places. I shall attempt to show that we must consider subject-matter
from the standpoint, first, of the _antecedents_ or conditions that
evoke thought; second, of the _datum_ or _immediate material_ presented
to thought; and, third, of the _proper content_ of thought. Of these
three distinctions the first, that of antecedent and stimulus, clearly
refers to the situation that is immediately prior to the
thought-function as such. The second, that of datum or immediately given
matter, refers to a distinction which is made within the thought-process
as a part of and for the sake of its own _modus operandi_. It is a
status in the scheme of thinking. The third, that of content or object,
refers to the progress actually made in any thought-function; the
material which is organized into the thought-situation, so far as this
has fulfilled its purpose. It goes without saying that these are to be
discriminated as stages of a life-process in the natural history of
experience, not as ready-made or ontological; it is contended that, save
as they are differentiated in connection with well-defined historical
stages, they are either lumped off as equivalents, or else treated as
absolute divisions--or as each by turns, according to the exigencies of
the particular argument. In fact, this chapter will get at the matter of
preliminary conditions of thought indirectly rather than directly, by
indicating the contradictory positions into which one of the most
vigorous and acute of modern logicians, Lotze, has been forced through
failing to define logical distinctions in terms of the history of
readjustment of experience, and therefore endeavoring to interpret
certain notions as absolute instead of as periodic and methodological.

Before passing directly to the exposition and criticism of Lotze, it
will be well, however, to take the matter in a somewhat freer way. We
cannot approach logical inquiry in a wholly direct and uncompromised
manner. Of necessity we bring to it certain distinctions--distinctions
partly the outcome of concrete experience; partly due to the logical
theory which has got embodied in ordinary language and in current
intellectual habits; partly results of deliberate scientific and
philosophic inquiry. These more or less ready-made results are
resources; they are the only weapons with which we can attack the new
problem. Yet they are full of unexamined assumptions; they commit us to
all sorts of logically predetermined conclusions. In one sense our study
of the new subject-matter, let us say logical theory, is in truth only a
review, a re-testing and criticising of the intellectual standpoints and
methods which we bring with us to the study.

Everyone comes with certain distinctions already made between the
subjective and the objective, between the physical and the psychical,
between the intellectual and the factual. (1) We have learned to regard
the region of emotional disturbance, of uncertainty and aspiration, as
belonging somehow peculiarly to ourselves; we have learned to set over
against this a world of observation and of valid thought as something
unaffected by our moods, hopes, fears, and opinions. (2) We have also
come to distinguish between what is immediately present in our
experience and the past and the future; we contrast the realms of memory
and anticipation of sense-perception; the given with the ideal. (3) We
are confirmed in a habit of distinguishing between what we call actual
fact and our mental attitude toward that fact--the attitude of surmise
or wonder or reflective investigation. While one of the aims of logical
theory is precisely to make us critically conscious of the significance
and bearing of these various distinctions, to change them from
ready-made assumptions into controlled constructs, our mental habits are
so set that they tend to have their own way with us; and we read into
logical theory conceptions that were formed before we had even dreamed
of the logical undertaking which after all has for its business to
assign to the terms in question their proper meaning.

We find in Lotze an unusually explicit inventory of these various
preliminary distinctions; and an unusually serious effort to deal with
the problems which arise from introducing them into the structure of
logical theory. (1) He expressly separates the matter of logical worth
from that of psychological genesis. He consequently abstracts the
subject-matter of logic as such wholly from the question of historic
_locus_ and _situs_. (2) He agrees with common-sense in holding that
logical thought is reflective and thus presupposes a given material. He
occupies himself with the nature of the antecedent conditions. (3) He
wrestles with the problem of how a material formed prior to thought and
irrespective of it can yet afford it stuff upon which to exercise
itself. (4) He expressly raises the question of how thought working
independently and from without upon a foreign material can shape the
latter into results which are valid--that is, objective.

If his discussion is successful; if Lotze can provide the intermediaries
which span the gulf between an independent thought-material and an
independent thought-activity; if he can show that the question of the
origin of thought-material and of thought-activity is irrelevant to the
question of its worth, we shall have to surrender the position already
taken. But if we find that Lotze's elaborations only elaborate the same
fundamental difficulty, presenting it now in this light and now in that,
but never effecting more than presenting the problem as if it were its
own solution, we shall be confirmed in our idea of the need of
considering logical questions from a different point of view. If we find
that, whatever his formal treatment, he always, as matter of fact, falls
back upon some organized situation or function as the source of both the
specific thought-material and the specific thought-activity in
correspondence with each other, we shall have in so far an elucidation
and even a corroboration of our theory.

1. We begin with the question of the material antecedents of
thought--antecedents which condition reflection, and which call it out
as reaction or response, by giving it its cue. Lotze differs from many
logicians of the same type in affording us an explicit account of these
antecedents. The ultimate material antecedents of thought are found in
impressions, which are due to external objects as stimuli. Taken in
themselves, these impressions are mere psychical states or events. They
exist in us side by side, or one after the other, according as the
objects which excite them operate simultaneously or successively. The
occurrence of these various psychical states is not, however, entirely
dependent upon the presence of the exciting thing. After a state has
once been excited, it gets the power of reawakening other states which
have accompanied it or followed it. The associative mechanism of revival
plays a part. If we had a complete knowledge of both the stimulating
object and its effects, and of the details of the associative mechanism,
we should be able from given data to predict the whole course of any
given train or current of ideas (for the impressions as conjoined
simultaneously or successively become ideas and a current of ideas).

Taken in itself, a sensation or impression is nothing but a "state of
our consciousness, a mood of ourselves." Any given current of ideas is a
necessary sequence of existences (just as necessary as any succession of
material events), happening in some particular sensitive soul or
organism. "Just because, under their respective conditions, every such
series of ideas hangs together by the same necessity and law as every
other, there would be no ground for making any such distinction of value
as that between truth and untruth, thus placing one group in opposition
to all the others."[5]

2. Thus far, as the last quotation clearly indicates, there is no
question of reflective thought, and hence no question of logical theory.
But further examination reveals a peculiar property of the current of
ideas. Some ideas are merely coincident, while others may be termed
coherent. That is to say, the exciting causes of some of our
simultaneous and successive ideas really belong together; while in other
cases they simply happen to act at the same time, without there being a
real connection between them. By the associative mechanism, however,
both the coherent and the merely coincident combinations recur. The
first type of recurrence supplies positive material for knowledge; the
second gives occasion for error.

3. It is a peculiar mixture of the coincident and the coherent which
sets the peculiar problem of reflective thought. The business of thought
is to recover and confirm the coherent, the really connected, adding to
its reinstatement an accessory justifying notion of the real ground of
coherence, while it eliminates the coincident as such. While the mere
current of ideas is something which just happens within us, the process
of elimination and of confirmation by means of statement of real ground
and basis of connection is an activity which mind as such exercises. It
is this distinction which marks off thought as activity from any
psychical event and from the associative mechanism as receptive
happenings. One is concerned with mere _de facto_ coexistences and
sequences; the other with the _worth_ of these combinations.[6]

Consideration of the peculiar work of thought in going over, sorting
out, and determining various ideas according to a standard of value will
occupy us in our next chapter. Here we are concerned with the material
antecedents of thought as they are described by Lotze. At first glance,
he seems to propound a satisfactory theory. He avoids the extravagancies
of transcendental logic, which assumes that all the matter of experience
is determined from the very start by rational thought; and he also
avoids the pitfall of purely empirical logic, which makes no distinction
between the mere occurrence and association of ideas and the real worth
and validity of the various conjunctions thus produced. He allows
unreflective experience, defined in terms of sensations and their
combinations, to provide material conditions for thinking, while he
reserves for thought a distinctive work and dignity of its own.
Sense-experience furnishes the antecedents; thought has to introduce and
develop systematic connection--rationality.

A further analysis of Lotze's treatment may, however, lead us to believe
that his statement is riddled through and through with inconsistencies
and self-contradictions; that, indeed, any one part of it can be
maintained only by the denial of some other portion.

1. The impression is the ultimate antecedent in its purest or crudest
form (according to the angle from which one views it). It is that which
has never felt, for good or for bad, the influence of thought. Combined
into ideas, these impressions stimulate or arouse the activities of
thought, which are forthwith directed upon them. As the recipient of the
activity which they have excited and brought to bear upon themselves,
they furnish also the material content of thought--its actual stuff. As
Lotze says over and over again: "It is the relations themselves already
subsisting between impressions, when we become conscious of them, by
which the action of thought which is never anything but reaction, is
attracted; and this action consists merely in interpreting relations
which we find existing between our passive impressions into aspects of
the matter of impressions."[7] And again:[8] "Thought can make no
difference where it finds none already in the matter of the
impressions." And again:[9] "The possibility and the success of
thought's procedure depends upon this original constitution and
organization of the whole world of ideas, a constitution which, though
not necessary in thought, is all the more necessary to make thinking
possible."

The impressions and ideas play a versatile rôle; they now assume the
part of ultimate antecedents and provocative conditions; of crude
material; and somehow, when arranged, of content for thought. This very
versatility awakens suspicion.

While the impression is merely subjective and a bare state of our own
consciousness, yet it is determined, both as to its existence and as to
its relation to other similar existences, by external objects as
stimuli, if not as causes. It is also determined by a psychical
mechanism so thoroughly objective or regular in its workings as to give
the same necessary character to the current of ideas that is possessed
by any physical sequence. Thus that which is "nothing but a state of our
consciousness" turns out straightway to be a specifically determined
objective fact in a system of facts.

That this absolute transformation is a contradiction is no clearer than
that just such a contradiction is indispensable to Lotze. If the
impressions were nothing but states of consciousness, moods of
ourselves, bare psychical existences, it is sure enough that we should
never even know them to be such, to say nothing of conserving them as
adequate conditions and material for thought. It is only by treating
them as real facts in a real world, and only by carrying over into them,
in some assumed and unexplained way, the capacity of representing the
cosmic facts which arouse them, that impressions or ideas come in any
sense within the scope of thought. But if the antecedents are really
impressions-in-their-objective-setting, then Lotze's whole way of
distinguishing thought-worth from _mere_ existence or event without
objective significance must be radically modified.

The implication that impressions have actually a matter or quality or
meaning of their own becomes explicit when we refer to Lotze's theory
that the immediate antecedent of thought is found in the _matter_ of
ideas. When thought is said to "take cognizance of _relations_ which its
own activity does not originate, but which have been prepared for it by
the unconscious mechanism of the psychic states,"[10] the attribution of
objective content, of reference and meaning to ideas, is unambiguous.
The idea forms a most convenient half-way house for Lotze. On one hand,
as absolutely prior to thought, as material antecedent condition, it is
merely psychical, a bald subjective event. But as subject-matter for
thought, as antecedent which affords stuff for thought's exercise, it is
_meaning_, characteristic quality of content.

Although we have been told that the impression is a mere receptive
irritation without participation of mental activity, we are not
surprised, in view of this capacity of ideas, to learn that the mind
actually has a determining share in both the reception of stimuli and in
their further associative combinations. The subject always enters into
the presentation of any mental object, even the sensational, to say
nothing of the perceptional and the imaged. The perception of a given
state of things is possible only on the assumption that "the perceiving
subject is at once enabled and compelled by its own nature to combine
the excitations which reach it from objects into those forms which it is
to perceive in the objects, and which it supposes itself simply to
_receive_ from them."[11]

It is only by continual transition from impression and ideas as mental
states and events to ideas as cognitive (or logical) _objects or
contents_, that Lotze bridges the gulf from bare exciting antecedent to
concrete material conditions of thought. This contradiction, again, is
necessary to Lotze's standpoint. To set out frankly with "meanings" as
antecedents would demand reconsideration of the whole view-point, which
supposes that the difference between the logical and its antecedent is a
matter of the difference between _worth_ and mere _existence_ or
_occurrence_. It would indicate that since meaning or value is already
there, the task of thought must be that of the transformation or
_reconstruction of worth_ through an intermediary process of valuation.
On the other hand, to stick by the standpoint of _mere_ existence is not
to get anything which can be called even antecedent of thought.

2. Why is there a task of transformation? Consideration of the material
in its function of evoking thought, giving it its cue, will serve to
complete the picture of the contradiction and of the real facts. It is
the conflict between ideas as merely coincident and ideas as coherent
that constitutes the need which provokes the response of thought. Here
Lotze vibrates (_a_) between considering coincidence and coherence as
both affairs of existence of psychical events; (_b_) considering
coincidence as purely psychical and coherence as at least quasi-logical,
and (_c_) the inherent logic which makes them both determinations within
the sphere of reflective thought. In strict accordance with his own
premises, coincidence and coherence both ought to be mere peculiarities
of the current of ideas as events within ourselves. But so taken the
distinction becomes absolutely meaningless. Events do not cohere; at the
most certain sets of them happen more or less frequently than other
sets; the only intelligible difference is one of repetition of
coincidence. And even this attributes to an event the supernatural trait
of reappearing after it has disappeared. Even coincidence has to be
defined in terms of relation of the _objects_ which are supposed to
excite the psychical events that happen together.

As recent psychological discussion has made clear enough, it is the
matter, meaning, or content, of ideas that is associated, not the ideas
as states or existences. Take such an idea as sun-revolving-about-earth.
We may say it means the conjunction of various sense-impressions, but it
is conjunction, or mutual reference, of _attributes_ that we have in
mind in the assertion. It is absolutely certain that our psychical image
of the sun is not psychically engaged in revolving about our psychical
image of the earth. It would be amusing if such were the case; theaters
and all dramatic representations would be at a discount. In truth,
sun-revolving-about-earth is a single meaning or idea; it is a unified
subject-matter within which certain distinctions of reference appear. It
is concerned with what we intend when we think earth and sun, and think
them in their relation to each other. It is really a specification or
direction of how to think when we have occasion to think a certain
subject-matter. To treat the origin of this mutual reference as if it
were simply a case of conjunction of ideas produced by conditions of
original psycho-physical irritation and association is a profound case
of the psychological fallacy. We may, indeed, analyze an experience and
find that it had its origin in certain conditions of the sensitive
organism, in certain peculiarities of perception and of association,
and hence conclude that the belief involved in it was not justified
by the facts themselves. But the significance of the belief in
sun-revolving-about-earth as an item of the experience of those who
meant it, consisted precisely in the fact that it was taken not as a
mere association of feelings, but as a definite portion of the whole
structure of objective experience, guaranteed by other parts of the
fabric, and lending its support and giving its tone to them. It was to
them part of the experience-frame of things--of the real universe.

Put the other way, if such an instance meant a mere conjunction of
psychical states, there would be in it absolutely nothing to evoke
thought. Each idea as event, as Lotze himself points out (Vol. I, p. 2),
may be regarded as adequately and necessarily determined to the place it
occupies. There is absolutely no question on the side of events of mere
coincidence _versus_ genuine connection. As event, it is there and it
belongs there. We cannot treat something as at once bare fact of
existence and as problematic subject-matter of logical inquiry. To take
the reflective point of view is to consider the matter in a totally new
light; as Lotze says, it is to raise the question of rightful claims to
a position or relation.

The point becomes clearer when we contrast coincidence with connection.
To consider coincidence as simply psychical, and coherence as at least
quasi-logical, is to put the two on such different bases that no
question of contrasting them can arise. The coincidence which precedes a
valid or grounded coherence (the conjunction which as coexistence of
objects and sequence of acts is perfectly adequate) never is, as
antecedent, the coincidence which is set over against coherence. The
side-by-sideness of books on my bookshelf, the succession of noises that
rise through my window, do not as such trouble me logically. They do not
appear as errors or even as problems. One coexistence is just as good as
any other until some new point of view, or new end, presents itself. If
it is a question of the convenience of arrangement of books, then the
value of their present collocation becomes a problem. Then I may
contrast their present bare conjunction with a scheme of possible
coherence. If I regard the sequence of noises as a case of articulate
speech, their order becomes important--it is a problem to be determined.
The inquiry whether a given combination means only apparent or real
connection, shows that reflective inquiry is already going on. Does this
phase of the moon really mean rain, or does it just happen that the
rain-storm comes when the moon has reached this phase? To ask such
questions shows that a certain portion of the universe of experience is
subjected to critical analysis for purposes of definitive restatement.
The tendency to regard one combination as bare conjunction or mere
coincidence is absolutely a _part_ of the movement of mind in its search
for the real connection.

If coexistence as such is to be set over against coherence as such, as
the non-logical against the logical, then, since our whole spatial
universe is one of collocation, and since thought in this universe can
never get farther than substituting one collocation for another, the
whole realm of space-experience is condemned off-hand and in perpetuity
to anti-rationality. But, in truth, coincidence as over against
coherence, conjunction as over against connection, is just _suspected_
coherence, one which is under the fire of active inquiry. The
distinction is one which arises only within the grasp of the logical or
reflective function.

3. This brings us explicitly to the fact that there is no such thing as
either coincidence or coherence in terms of the elements or meanings
contained in any couple or pair of ideas taken by itself. It is only
when they are co-factors in a situation or function which includes more
than either the "coincident" or the "coherent" and more than the
arithmetical sum of the two, that thought's activity can be evoked.
Lotze is continually in this dilemma: Thought either shapes its own
material or else just accepts it. In the first case (since Lotze cannot
rid himself of the presumption that thought must have a fixed ready-made
antecedent) its activity can only alter this stuff and thus lead the
mind farther away from reality. But if thought just accepts its
material, how can there be any distinctive aim or activity of thought at
all? As we have seen, Lotze endeavors to escape this dilemma by
supposing that, while thought receives its material, it yet checks it
up: it eliminates certain portions of it and reinstates others, plus the
stamp and seal of its own validity.

Lotze objects most strenuously to the notion that thought awaits its
subject-matter with certain ready-made modes of apprehension. This
notion would raise the insoluble question of how thought contrives to
bring the matter of each impression under that particular form which is
appropriate to it (Vol. I, p. 24). But he has not really avoided the
difficulty. How does thought know which of the combinations are merely
coincident and which are merely coherent? How does it know which to
eliminate as irrelevant and which to confirm as grounded? Either this
evaluation is an imposition of its own, or else gets its cue and clue
from the subject-matter. Now, if the coincident and the coherent taken
in and of themselves are competent to give this direction, they are
already practically labeled. The further work of thought is one of
supererogation. It has at most barely to note and seal the material
combinations that are already there. Such a view clearly renders
thought's work as unnecessary in form as it is futile in force.

But there is no alternative in this dilemma except to recognize that an
entire situation of experience, within which are both that afterward
found to be mere coincidence and that found to be real connection,
actually provokes thought. It is only as an experience previously
accepted comes up in its wholeness against another one equally integral;
and only as some larger experience dawns which requires each as a part
of itself and yet within which the required factors show themselves
mutually incompatible, that thought arises. It is not bare coincidence,
or bare connection, or bare addition of one to the other, that excites
thought. It is a situation which is organized or constituted as a whole,
and which yet is falling to pieces in its parts--a situation which is in
conflict within itself--that arouses the search to find what really goes
together and a correspondent effort to shut out what only seemingly
belongs together. And real coherence means precisely capacity to exist
within the comprehending whole. It is a case of the psychologist's
fallacy to read back into the preliminary situation those distinctions
of mere conjunction of material and of valid relationship which get
existence, to say nothing of fixation, only within the thought-process.

We must not leave this phase of the discussion, however, until it is
quite clear that our objection is not to Lotze's position that
reflective thought arises from an antecedent which is not reflectional
in character; nor yet to his idea that this antecedent has a certain
structure and content of its own setting the peculiar problem which
evokes thought and gives the cue to its specific activities. On the
contrary, it is this latter point upon which we would insist; and, by
insisting, point out, negatively, that this view is absolutely
inconsistent with Lotze's theory that psychical impressions and ideas
are the true antecedents of thought; and, positively, that it is the
_situation as a whole_, and not any one isolated part of it, or
distinction within it, that calls forth and directs thinking. We must
beware the fallacy of assuming that some one element in the prior
situation in isolation or detachment induces the thought which in
reality comes forth only from the whole disturbed situation. On the
negative side, characterizations of impression and idea (whether as
mental contents or as psychical existences) are distinctions which arise
only within reflection upon the situation which is the genuine
antecedent of thought; while the distinction of psychical existences
from external existences arises only within a highly elaborate technical
reflection--that of the psychologist as such.[12] Positively, it is the
whole dynamic experience with its qualitative and pervasive identity of
value, and its inner distraction, its elements at odds with each other,
in tension against each other, contending each for its proper placing
and relationship, that generates the thought-situation.

From this point of view, at this period of development, the distinctions
of objective and subjective have a characteristic meaning. The
antecedent, to repeat, is a situation in which the various factors are
actively incompatible with each other, and which yet in and through the
striving tend to a re-formation of the whole and to a restatement of the
parts. This situation as such is clearly objective. It is there; it is
there as a whole; the various parts are there; and their active
incompatibility with one another is there. Nothing is conveyed at this
point by asserting that any particular part of the situation is illusory
or subjective, or mere appearance; or that any other is truly real. It
is the further work of _thought_ to exclude some of the contending
factors from membership in experience, and thus to relegate them to the
sphere of the merely subjective. But just at this epoch the experience
exists as one of vital and active confusion and conflict. The conflict
is not only objective in a _de facto_ sense (that is, really existent),
but is objective in a logical sense as well; it is just this conflict
which effects the transition into the thought-situation--this, in turn,
being only a constant movement toward a defined equilibrium. The
conflict has objective logical value because it is the antecedent
condition and cue of thought.

Every reflective attitude and function, whether of naïve life,
deliberate invention, or controlled scientific research, has risen
through the medium of some such total objective situation. The abstract
logician may tell us that sensations or impressions, or associated
ideas, or bare physical things, or conventional symbols, are antecedent
conditions. But such statements cannot be verified by reference to a
single instance of thought in connection with actual practice or actual
scientific research. Of course, by extreme mediation symbols may become
conditions of evoking thought. They get to be objects in an active
experience. But they are stimuli only in case their manipulation to form
a new whole occasions resistance, and thus reciprocal tension. Symbols
and their definitions develop to a point where dealing with them becomes
itself an experience, having its own identity; just as the handling of
commercial commodities, or arrangement of parts of an invention, is an
individual experience. There is always as antecedent to thought an
experience of some subject-matter of the physical or social world, or
organized intellectual world, whose parts are actively at war with each
other--so much so that they threaten to disrupt the entire experience,
which accordingly for its own maintenance requires deliberate
re-definition and re-relation of its tensional parts. This is the
reconstructive process termed thinking: the reconstructive situation,
with its parts in tension and in such movement toward each other as
tends to a unified experience, is the thought-situation.

This at once suggests the subjective phase. The situation, the
experience as such, is objective. There is an experience of the confused
and conflicting tendencies. But just _what in particular_ is objective,
just _what_ form the situation shall take as an organized harmonious
whole, is unknown; that is the problem. It is the uncertainty as to the
_what_ of the experience together with the certainty _that_ there is
such an experience, that evokes the thought-function. Viewed from this
standpoint of uncertainty, the situation as a whole is subjective. No
particular content or reference can be asserted off-hand. Definite
assertion is expressly reserved--it is to be the outcome of the
procedure of reflective inquiry now undertaken. This holding off of
contents from definitely asserted position, this viewing them as
candidates for reform, is what we mean at this stage of the natural
history of thought by the subjective.

We have followed Lotze through his tortuous course of inconsistencies.
It is better, perhaps, to run the risk of vain repetition, than that of
leaving the impression that these are _mere_ self-contradictions. It is
an idle task to expose contradictions save we realize them in relation
to the fundamental assumption which breeds them. Lotze is bound to
differentiate thought from its antecedents. He is intent to do this,
however, through a preconception that marks off the thought-situation
radically from its predecessor, through a difference that is complete,
fixed, and absolute, or at large. It is a total contrast of thought as
such to something else as such that he requires, not a contrast within
experience of one phase of a process, one period of a rhythm, from
others.

This complete and rigid difference Lotze finds in the difference between
an experience which is _mere existence_ or occurrence, and one which has
to do with worth, truth, right relationship. Now things, objects, have
already, implicitly at least, determinations of worth, of truth,
reality, etc. The same is true of deeds, affections, etc., etc. Only
states of feelings, bare impressions, etc., seem to fulfil the
prerequisite of being given as existence, and yet without qualification
as to worth, etc. Then the current of ideas offers itself, a ready-made
stream of events, of existences, which can be characterized as wholly
innocent of reflective determination, and as the natural predecessor of
thought.

But this stream of existences is no sooner there than its total
incapacity to officiate as material condition and cue of thought
appears. It is about as relevant as are changes that may be happening on
the other side of the moon. So, one by one, the whole series of
determinations of value or worth already traced are introduced _into_
the very make-up, the inner structure, of what was to be _mere_
existence: viz., (1) value as determined by things of whose spatial and
temporal relations the things are somehow _representative_; (2) hence,
value in the shape of _meaning_--the idea as significant, possessed of
quality, and not a mere event; (3) distinguished values of coincidence
and coherence within the stream. All these kinds of value are explicitly
asserted, as we have seen; underlying and running through them all is
the recognition of the supreme value of a situation which is organized
as a whole, yet conflicting in its inner constitution.

These contradictions all arise in the attempt to put thought's work, as
concerned with value or validity over against experience as a mere
antecedent happening, or occurrence. Since this contrast arises because
of the deeper attempt to consider thought as an independent somewhat in
general which yet, in _our_ experience, is specifically dependent, the
sole radical avoiding of the contradictions can be found in the endeavor
to characterize thought as a specific mode of valuation in the evolution
of significant experience, having its own specific occasion or demand,
and its own specific place.

The nature of the organization and value that the antecedent conditions
of the thought-function possess is too large a question here to enter
upon in detail. Lotze himself suggests the answer. He speaks of the
current of ideas, just as a current, supplying us with the "mass of
well-grounded information which _regulates_ daily life" (Vol. I, p. 4).
It gives rise to "_useful combinations_," "_correct expectations_,"
"_seasonable reactions_" (Vol. I, p. 7). He speaks of it, indeed, as if
it were just the ordinary world of naïve experience, the so-called
empirical world, as distinct from the world as critically revised and
rationalized in scientific and philosophic inquiry. The contradiction
between this interpretation and that of a mere stream of psychical
impressions is only another instance of the difficulty already
discussed. But the phraseology suggests the type of value possessed by
it. The unreflective world is a world of practical values; of ends and
means, of their effective adaptations; of control and regulation of
conduct in view of results. Even the most purely utilitarian of values
are nevertheless values; not _mere_ existences. But the world of
uncritical experience is saved from reduction to just material uses and
worths; for it is a world of social aims and means, involving at every
turn the values of affection and attachment, of competition and
co-operation. It has incorporate also in its own being the surprise of
æsthetic values--the sudden joy of light, the gracious wonder of tone
and form.

I do not mean that this holds in gross of the unreflective world of
experience over against the critical thought-situation--such a contrast
implies the very wholesale, at large, consideration of thought which I
am striving to avoid. Doubtless many and many an act of thought has
intervened in effecting the organization of our commonest
practical-affectional-æsthetic region of values. I only mean to indicate
that thought does take place in such a world; not _after_ a world of
bare existences lacking value-specifications; and that the more
systematic reflection we call organized science, may, in some fair
sense, be said to come _after_, but to come after affectional, artistic,
and technological interests which have found realization and expression
in building up a world of values.

Having entered so far upon a suggestion which cannot be followed out, I
venture one other digression. The notion that value or significance as
distinct from mere existentiality is the product of thought or reason,
and that the source of Lotze's contradictions lies in the effort to find
_any_ situation prior or antecedent to thought, is a familiar one--it is
even possible that my criticisms of Lotze have been interpreted by some
readers in this sense.[13] This is the position frequently called
neo-Hegelian (though, I think, with questionable accuracy), and has been
developed by many writers in criticising Kant. This position and that
taken in this chapter do indeed agree in certain general regards. They
are at one in denial of the factuality and the possibility of
developing fruitful reflection out of antecedent bare existence or mere
events. They unite in denying that there is or can be any such thing as
mere existence--phenomenon unqualified as respects meaning, whether such
phenomenon be psychic or cosmic. They agree that reflective thought
grows organically out of an experience which is already organized, and
that it functions within such an organism. But they part company when a
fundamental question is raised: Is all organized meaning the work of
thought? Does it therefore follow that the organization out of which
reflective thought grows is the work of thought of some other type--of
Pure Thought, Creative or Constitutive Thought, Intuitive Reason, etc.?
I shall indicate briefly the reasons for divergence at this point.

To cover all the practical-social-æsthetic values involved, the term
"thought" has to be so stretched that the situation might as well be
called by any other name that describes a typical value of experience.
More specifically, when the difference is minimized between the
organized and arranged scheme of values out of which reflective inquiry
proceeds, and reflective inquiry itself (and there can be no other
reason for insisting that the antecedent of reflective thought is itself
somehow thought), exactly the same type of problem recurs that presents
itself when the distinction is exaggerated into one between bare
unvalued existences and rational coherent meanings.

For the more one insists that the antecedent situation is constituted by
thought, the more one has to wonder why another type of thought is
required; what need arouses it, and how it is possible for it to improve
upon the work of previous constitutive thought. This difficulty at once
forces us from a logic of experience as it is concretely experienced
into a metaphysic of a purely hypothetical experience. Constitutive
thought precedes _our_ conscious thought-operations; hence it must be
the working of some absolute universal thought which, unconsciously to
our reflection, builds up an organized world. But this recourse only
deepens the difficulty. How does it happen that the absolute
constitutive and intuitive Thought does such a poor and bungling job
that it requires a finite discursive activity to patch up its products?
Here more metaphysic is called for: The Absolute Reason is now supposed
to work under limiting conditions of finitude, of a sensitive and
temporal organism. The antecedents of reflective thought are not,
therefore, determinations of thought pure and undefiled, but of what
thought can do when it stoops to assume the yoke of change and of
feeling. I pass by the metaphysical problem left unsolved by this flight
into metaphysic: Why and how should a perfect, absolute, complete,
finished thought find it necessary to submit to alien, disturbing, and
corrupting conditions in order, in the end, to recover through
reflective thought in a partial, piecemeal, wholly inadequate way what
it possessed at the outset in a much more satisfactory way?

I confine myself to the logical difficulty. How can thought relate
itself to the fragmentary sensations, impressions, feelings, which, in
their contrast with and disparity from the workings of constitutive
thought, mark it off from the latter; and which in their connection with
its products give the cue to reflective thinking? _Here we have again
exactly the problem with which Lotze has been wrestling_: we have the
same insoluble question of the reference of thought-activity to a wholly
indeterminate unrationalized, independent, prior existence. The absolute
rationalist who takes up the problem at this point will find himself
forced into the same continuous seesaw, the same scheme of alternate
rude robbery and gratuitous gift, that Lotze engaged in. The simple fact
is that here _is_ just where Lotze himself began; he saw that previous
transcendental logicians had left untouched the specific question of
relation of _our_ supposedly finite, reflective thought to its own
antecedents, and he set out to make good the defect. If reflective
thought is required because constitutive thought works under externally
limiting conditions of sense, then we have some elements which are,
after all, mere existences, events, etc. Or, if they have organization
from some other source, and induce reflective thought not as bare
impressions, etc., but through their place in some whole, then we have
admitted the possibility of organic unity in experience, apart from
Reason, and the ground for assuming Pure Constitutive Thought is
abandoned.

The contradiction appears equally when viewed from the side of
thought-activity and its characteristic forms. All our knowledge, after
all, of thought as constitutive is gained by consideration of the
operations of reflective thought. The perfect system of thought is so
perfect that it is a luminous, harmonious whole, without definite parts
or distinctions--or, if there are such, it is only reflection that
brings them out. The categories and methods of constitutive thought
itself must therefore be characterized in terms of the _modus operandi_
of reflective thought. Yet the latter takes place just because of the
peculiar problem of the peculiar conditions under which it arises. Its
work is progressive, reformatory, reconstructive, synthetic, in the
terminology made familiar by Kant. We are not only _not_ justified,
accordingly, in transferring its determinations over to constitutive
thought, but we are absolutely prohibited from attempting any such
transfer. To identify logical processes, states, devices, results that
are conditioned upon the primary fact of resistance to thought as
constitutive with the structure of such thought is as complete an
instance of the fallacy of recourse from one genus to another as could
well be found. Constitutive and reflective thought are, first, defined
in terms of their dissimilarity and even opposition, and then without
more ado the forms of the description of the latter are carried over
bodily to the former![14]

This is not meant for a merely controversial criticism. It is meant to
point positively toward the fundamental thesis of these chapters: All
the distinctions of the thought-function, of conception as over against
sense-perception, of judgment in its various modes and forms, of
inference in its vast diversity of operation--all these distinctions
come within the thought-situation as growing out of a characteristic
antecedent typical formation of experience; and have for their purpose
the solution of the peculiar problem with respect to which the
thought-function is generated or evolved: the restoration of a
deliberately integrated experience from the inherent conflict into which
it has fallen.

The failure of transcendental logic has the same origin as the failure
of the empiristic (whether taken pure or in the mixed form in which
Lotze presents it). It makes absolute and fixed certain distinctions of
existence and meaning, and of one kind of meaning and another kind,
which are wholly historic and relative in their origin and their
significance. It views thought as attempting to represent or state
reality once for all, instead of trying to determine some phases or
contents of it with reference to their more effective and significant
reciprocal employ--instead of as reconstructive. The rock against which
every such logic splits is that either reality already has the statement
which thought is endeavoring to give it, or else it has not. In the
former case, thought is futilely reiterative; in the latter, it is
falsificatory.

The significance of Lotze for critical purposes is that his peculiar
effort to combine a transcendental view of thought (_i. e._, of Thought
as active in forms of its own, pure in and of themselves) with certain
obvious facts of the dependence of our thought upon specific empirical
antecedents, brings to light fundamental defects in both the empiristic
and the transcendental logics. We discover a common failure in both: the
failure to view logical terms and distinctions with respect to their
necessary function in the redintegration of experience.




III

THOUGHT AND ITS SUBJECT-MATTER: THE DATUM OF THINKING


We have now reached a second epochal stage in the evolution of the
thought-situation, a crisis which forces upon us the problem of the
distinction and mutual reference of the datum or presentation, and the
ideas or "thoughts." It will economize and perhaps clarify discussion if
we start from the relatively positive and constructive result just
reached, and review Lotze's treatment from that point of regard.

We have reached the point of conflict in the matters or contents of an
experience. It is _in_ this conflict and because of it that the matters
or contents, or significant quales, stand out as such. As long as the
sun revolves about earth without tension or question, this "content," or
fact, is not in any way abstracted _as_ content or object. Its very
distinction as content from the form or mode of experience as such is
the result of post-reflection. The same conflict makes other experiences
assume conscious objectification; they, too, cease to be ways of living,
and become distinct objects of observation and consideration. The
movements of planets, eclipses, etc., are cases in point.[15] The
maintenance of a unified experience has become a problem, an end. It is
no longer secure. But this involves such restatement of the conflicting
elements as will enable them to take a place somewhere in the new
experience; they must be disposed of somehow, and they can be disposed
of finally only as they are provided for. That is, they cannot be
simply denied or excluded or eliminated; they must be taken into the
fold of the new experience; such introduction, on the other hand,
clearly demands more or less modification or transformation on their
part. The thought-situation is the conscious maintenance of the unity of
experience, with a critical consideration of the claims of the various
conflicting contents to a place within itself, and a deliberate final
assignment of position.

The conflicting situation inevitably polarizes or dichotomizes itself.
There is somewhat which is untouched in the contention of incompatibles.
There is something which remains secure, unquestioned. On the other
hand, there are elements which are rendered doubtful and precarious.
This gives the framework of the general distribution of the field into
"facts," the given, the presented, the Datum; and ideas, the ideal, the
conceived, the Thought. For there is always something unquestioned in
any problematic situation at any stage of its process,[16] even if it be
only the fact of conflict or tension. For this is never _mere_ tension
at large. It is thoroughly qualified, or characteristically toned and
colored, by the particular elements which are in strife. Hence it is
_this_ conflict, unique and irreplaceable. That it comes now means
precisely that it has never come before; that it is now passed in review
and some sort of a settlement reached, means that just _this_ conflict
will never recur. In a word, the conflict as such is immediately
expressed, or felt, as of just this and no other sort, and this
immediately apprehended quality is an irreducible datum. _It_ is fact,
even if all else be _doubtful_. As it is subjected to examination, it
loses vagueness and assumes more definite form.

Only in very extreme cases, however, does the assured, unquestioned
element reduce to as low terms as we have here imagined. Certain things
come to stand forth as facts, no matter what else may be doubted. There
are certain _apparent_ diurnal changes of the sun; there is a certain
annual course or track. There are certain nocturnal changes in the
planets, and certain seasonal rhythmic paths. The significance of these
may be doubted: Do they _mean_ real change in the sun or in the earth?
But change, and change of a certain definite and numerically determinate
character is there. It is clear that such out-standing facts
(ex-istences) constitute the data, the given or presented, of the
thought-function.

It is obvious that this is only one correspondent, or status, in the
total situation. With the consciousness of _this_ as certain, as given
to be reckoned with, goes the consciousness of uncertainty as to _what
it means_--of how it is to be understood or interpreted. The facts _qua_
presentation or existences are sure; _qua_ meaning (position and
relationship in an experience yet to be secured) they are doubtful.
Yet doubt does not preclude memory or anticipation. Indeed, it is
possible only through them. The memory of past experience makes
sun-revolving-about-earth an object of attentive regard. The
recollection of certain other experiences suggests the idea of
earth-rotating-daily-on-axis and revolving-annually-about-sun. These
contents are as much present as is the observation of change, but as
respects worth, they are only possibilities. Accordingly, they are
categorized or disposed of as just ideas, meanings, thoughts, ways of
conceiving, comprehending, interpreting facts.

Correspondence of reference here is as obvious as correlation of
existence. In the logical process, the datum is not just real existence,
and the idea mere psychical unreality. Both are modes of existence--one
of _given_ existence, the other of _mental_ existence. And if the
mental existence is in such cases regarded, from the standpoint of the
unified experience aimed at, as having only _possible_ value, the datum
also is regarded, from the value standpoint, as incomplete and
unassured. The very existence of the idea or meaning as separate _is_
the partial, broken up, and hence objectively unreal (from the validity
standpoint) character of the datum. Or, as we commonly put it, while the
ideas are impressions, suggestions, guesses, theories, estimates, etc.,
the facts are crude, raw, unorganized, brute. They lack relationship,
that is, assured place in the universe; they are deficient as to
continuity. Mere change of apparent position of sun, which is absolutely
unquestioned as datum, is a sheer abstraction from the standpoint either
of the organized experience left behind, or of the reorganized
experience which is the end--the objective. It is impossible as a
persistent object in experience or reality. In other words, datum and
ideatum are divisions of labor, co-operative instrumentalities, for
economical dealing with the problem of the maintenance of the integrity
of experience.

Once more, and briefly, both datum and ideatum may (and positively,
veritably, do) break up, each for itself, into physical and psychical.
In so far as the conviction gains ground that the earth revolves about
the sun, the old fact is broken up into a new cosmic existence, and a
new psychological condition--the recognition of a mental process in
virtue of which movements of smaller bodies in relation to very remote
larger bodies are interpreted in a reverse sense. We do not just
eliminate as false the source of error in the old content. We
reinterpret it as valid in its own place, viz., a case of the psychology
of apperception, although invalid as a matter of cosmic structure. In
other words, with increasing accuracy of determination of the given,
there comes a distinction, for methodological purposes, between the
_quality_ or matter of the sense-experience and its _form_--the
sense-perceiving, as itself a psychological fact, having its own place
and laws or relations. Moreover, the old experience, that of
sun-revolving, abides. But it is regarded as belonging to "me"--to this
experiencing individual, rather than to the cosmic world. It is
_psychic_.

Here, then, _within_ the growth of the thought-situation and as a part
of the process of determining _specific_ truth under _specific_
conditions, we get for the first time the clue to that distinction with
which, as ready-made and prior to all thinking, Lotze started out,
namely, the separation of the matter of impression from impression as
psychical event. The separation which, taken at large, engenders an
insoluble problem, appears within a particular reflective inquiry, as an
inevitable differentiation of a scheme of values.

The same sort of thing occurs on the side of thought, or meaning. The
meaning or idea which is growing in acceptance, which is gaining ground
as meaning-of-datum, gets logical or intellectual or objective force;
that which is losing standing, which is increasingly doubtful, gets
qualified as just a notion, a fancy, a pre-judice, mis-conception--or
finally just an error, a mental slip.

Evaluated as fanciful in validity it becomes mere image--subjective;[17]
and finally a psychical existence. It is not eliminated, but receives a
new reference or meaning. Thus the distinction between subjectivity and
objectivity is not one between meaning as such and datum as such. It is
a specification that emerges, correspondently, in _both_ datum and
ideatum, as affairs of the direction of logical movement. That which is
left behind in the evolution of accepted meaning is characterized as
real, but only in a psychical sense; that which is moved toward is
regarded as real in an objective, cosmic sense.[18]

The implication of the psychic and the logical within both the given
presentation and the thought about it, appears in the continual shift to
which logicians of Lotze's type are put. When the psychical is regarded
as existence over against meaning as just ideal, reality seems to reside
in the psychical; it is _there_ anyhow, and meaning is just a curious
attachment--curious because as _mere meaning_ it is non-existent as
event or state--and there seems to be nothing by which it can be even
tied to the psychical state as its bearer or representative. But when
the emphasis falls on thought as _content_, as significance, then the
psychic event, the idea as image[19] (as distinct from idea as meaning)
appears as an accidental but necessary evil, the unfortunate irrelevant
medium through which _our_ thinking has to go on.[20]

1. _The data of thought._--When we turn to Lotze, we find that he makes
a clear distinction between the presented material of thought, its
datum, and the typical characteristic modes of thinking in virtue of
which the datum gets organization or system. It is interesting to note
also that he states the datum in terms different from those in which the
antecedents of thought are defined. From the point of view of the
material upon which ideas exercise themselves, it is not coincidence,
collocation, or succession that counts; but gradation of degrees in a
scale. It is not things in spatial or temporal grouping that are
emphasized, but qualities as mutually distinguished, yet classed--as
differences of a common somewhat. There is no inherent inconceivability
in the idea that every impression should be as incomparably different
from every other as sweet is from warm. But by a remarkable circumstance
such is not the case. We have series, and networks of series. We have
diversity of a common--diverse colors, sounds, smells, tastes, etc. In
other words, the datum is sense-qualities which, fortunately for
thought, are given arranged, as shades, degrees, variations, or
qualities of somewhat that is identical.[21]

All this is given, presented, to our ideational activities. Even the
universal, the common-color which runs through the various qualities of
blue, green, white, etc., is not a product of thought, but something
which thought finds already in existence. It conditions comparison and
reciprocal distinction. Particularly all mathematical determinations,
whether of counting (number), degree (more or less), and quantity
(greatness and smallness), come back to this peculiarity of the datum of
thought. Here Lotze dwells at considerable length upon the fact that the
very possibility, as well as the success, of thought is due to this
peculiar universalization or _prima facie_ ordering with which its
material is given to it. Such pre-established fitness in the meeting of
two things that have nothing to do with each other is certainly cause
enough for wonder and congratulation.

It should not be difficult to see why Lotze uses different categories in
describing the given material of thought from those employed in
describing its antecedent conditions, even though, according to him, the
two are absolutely the same.[22] He has different _functions_ in mind.
In one case, the material must be characterized as evoking, as
incentive, as stimulus--from this point of view the peculiar combination
of coincidence and coherence is emphasized. But in the other case the
material must be characterized as affording stuff, actual
subject-matter. Data are not only what is given _to_ thought, but they
are also the food, the raw material, _of_ thought. They must be
described as, on the one hand, wholly outside of thought. This clearly
puts them into the region of sense-perception. They are matter of
_sensation_ given free from all inferring, judging, relating influence.
Sensation is just what is _not_ called up in memory or in anticipated
projection--it is the immediate, the irreducible. On the other hand,
sensory-_matter_ is qualitative, and quales are made up on a common
basis. They are degrees or grades of a common quality. Thus they have a
certain ready-made setting of mutual distinction and reference which is
already almost, if not quite, the effect of comparing, of relating, and
these are the express traits of thinking.

It is easy to interpret this miraculous gift of grace in the light of
what has been said. The data are in truth precisely that which is
selected and set aside _as_ present, as immediate. Thus they are _given_
to _further_ thought. But the selection has occurred in view of the need
for thought; it is a listing of the capital in the way of the
undisturbed, the undiscussed, which thought can count upon in this
particular problem. Hence it is not strange that it has a peculiar
fitness of adaptation for thought's further work. Having been selected
with precisely that end in view, the wonder would be if it were not so
fitted. A man may coin counterfeit money for use upon others, but hardly
with the intent of passing it off upon himself.

Our only difficulty here is that the mind flies away from the logical
interpretation of sense-datum to a ready-made notion of it brought over
from abstract psychological inquiry. The belief in sensory quales as
somehow forced upon us, and forced upon us at large, and thus
conditioning thought wholly _ab extra_, instead of determining it as
instrumentalities or elements in its own scheme, is too fixed. Such
qualities _are_ forced upon us, but _not_ at large. The sensory data of
experience, as distinct from the psychologists' constructs, always come
_in a context_; they always appear as variations in a continuum of
values. Even the thunder which breaks in upon me (to take the extreme of
apparent discontinuity and irrelevancy) disturbs me because it is taken
as a part of the same space-world as that in which my chair and room and
house are located; and it is taken as an influence which interrupts and
disturbs, _because_ it is part of my common world of causes and effects.
The solution of continuity is itself practical or teleological, and thus
presupposes and affects continuity of purpose, occupations, and means in
a life-process. It is not metaphysics, it is biology which enforces the
idea that actual sensation is not only determined as an event in a world
of events,[23] but is an occurrence occurring at a certain period in the
evolution of experience, marking a certain point in its cycle, and,
consequently--having always its own conscious context and bearings--is a
characteristic function of reconstruction in experience.[24]

2. _Forms of thinking data._--As sensory datum is material set for the
work of thought, so the ideational forms with which thought does its
work are apt and prompt to meet the needs of the material. The
"accessory"[25] notion of ground of coherence turns out, in truth, not
to be a formal, or external, addition to the data, but a requalification
of them. Thought is accessory as accomplice, not as addendum. "Thought"
is to eliminate mere coincidence, and to assert grounded coherence.
Lotze makes it absolutely clear that he does not at bottom conceive of
"thought" as an activity "in itself" imposing a form of coherence; but
that the organizing work of "thought" is only the progressive
realization of an inherent unity, or system, in the material experience.
The specific modes in which thought brings its "accessory" power to
bear--names, conception, judgment, and inference--are successive stages
in the adequate organization of the matter which comes to us first as
datum; they are successive stages of the effort to overcome the
original defects of the datum. Conception starts from the given
universal (the common element) of sense. Yet (and this is the
significant point) it does not simply abstract this common element, and
consciously generalize it as over against its own differences. Such a
"universal" is _not_ coherence, just because it does not _include_ and
dominate the temporal and local heterogeneity. The _true_ concept (see
Vol. I, p. 38) is a system of attributes, held together on the basis of
some ground, or determining, dominating principle--a ground which so
controls all its own instances as to make them into an inwardly
connected whole, and so specifies its own limits as to be exclusive of
all else. If we abstract color as the common element of various colors,
the result is not a scientific idea or concept. Discovery of a process
of light-waves whose various rates constitute the various colors of the
spectrum gives the concept. And when we get such a concept, the former
mere temporal abruptness of color experiences gives way to organic parts
of a color system. The logical product--the concept, in other words--is
not a formal seal or stamp; it is a thoroughgoing transformation of data
in a given sense.

The form or mode of thought which marks the continued transformation of
the data and the idea in reference to each other is judgment. Judgment
makes explicit the assumption of a principle which determines connection
within an individualized whole. It definitely states red as _this_ case
or instance of the law or process of color, and thus overcomes further
the defect in _subject-matter_ or data still left by conception.[26] Now
judgment logically terminates in disjunction. It gives a universal
which may determine any one of a number of alternative defined
particulars, but which is arbitrary as to _what_ one is selected.
Systematic _inference_ brings to light the material conditions under
which the law, or dominating universal, applies to this, rather than
that alternative particular, and so completes the ideal organization of
the subject-matter. If this act were complete, we should finally have
present to us a whole on which we should know the determining and
effective or authorizing elements, and the order of development or
hierarchy of dependence, in which others follow from them.[27]

In this account by Lotze of the operations of the forms of thought,
there is clearly put before us the picture of a continuous correlative
determination of datum on one side and of idea or meaning on the other,
till experience is again integral, data thoroughly defined and
corrected, and ideas completely incarnate as the relevant meaning of
subject-matter. That we have here in outline a description of what
actually occurs there can be no doubt. But there is as little doubt that
it is thoroughly inconsistent with Lotze's supposition that the material
or data of thought is precisely the same as the antecedents of thought;
or that ideas, conceptions, are purely mental somewhats brought to bear,
as the sole essential characteristics of thought, extraneously upon a
material provided ready-made. It means but one thing: The maintenance of
unity and wholeness in experience through conflicting contents occurs by
means of a strictly correspondent setting apart of fact to be accurately
described and properly related, and meaning to be adequately construed
and properly referred. The datum is given _in_ the thought-situation,
and _to_ further qualification of ideas or meanings. But even in this
aspect it presents a problem. To find out _what is_ given is an inquiry
which taxes reflection to the uttermost. Every important advance in
scientific method means better agencies, more skilled technique for
simply detaching and describing what is barely there, or given. To be
able to find out what can safely be taken as _there_, as given in any
particular inquiry, and hence be taken as material for orderly and
verifiable thinking, for fruitful hypothesis-making, for entertaining of
explanatory and interpretative ideas, is one phase of the effort of
systematic scientific inquiry. It marks its inductive phase. To take
what is given _in_ the thought-situation, for the sake of accomplishing
the aim of thought (along with a correlative discrimination of ideas or
meanings), as if it were given absolutely, or apart from a particular
historic situs and context, is the fallacy of empiricism as a logical
theory. To regard the thought-forms of conception, judgment, and
inference as qualifications of "pure thought, apart from any difference
in objects," instead of as successive dispositions in the progressive
organization of the material (or objects) is the fallacy of rationalism.
Lotze attempts to combine the two, thinking thereby to correct each by
the other.

Lotze recognizes the futility of thought if the sense-data are final, if
they alone are real, the truly existent, self-justificatory and valid.
He sees that, if the empiricist were right in his assumption as to the
real worth of the given data, thinking would be a ridiculous pretender,
either toilfully and poorly doing over again what needs no doing, or
making a wilful departure from truth. He realizes that thought really is
evoked because it is needed, and that it has a work to do which is not
merely formal, but which effects a modification of the subject-matter of
experience. Consequently he assumes a thought-in-itself, with certain
forms and modes of action of its own, a realm of meaning possessed of a
directive and normative worth of its own--the root-fallacy of
rationalism. His attempted compromise between the two turns out to be
based on the assumption of the indefensible ideas of both--the notion of
an independent matter of thought, on one side, and of an independent
worth or value of thought-forms, on the other.

This pointing out of inconsistencies becomes stale and unprofitable save
as we bring them back into connection with their root-origin--the
erection of distinctions that are genetic and historic, and working or
instrumental divisions of labor, into rigid and ready-made differences
of structural reality. Lotze clearly recognizes that thought's nature is
dependent upon its aim, its aim upon its problem, and this upon the
situation in which it finds its incentive and excuse. Its work is cut
out for it. It does not what it would, but what it must. As Lotze puts
it, "Logic has to do with thought, not as it would be under
hypothetical conditions, but as it is" (Vol. I, p. 33), and this
statement is made in explicit combination with statements to the effect
that the peculiarity of the material of thought conditions its activity.
Similarly he says in a passage already referred to: "The possibility and
the success of thought's production in general depends upon this
original constitution and organization of the whole world of ideas, a
constitution which, though not necessary in thought, is all the more
necessary to make thought possible."[28]

As we have seen, the essential nature of conception, judgment, and
inference is dependent upon peculiarities of the propounded material,
they being forms dependent for their significance upon the stage of
organization in which they begin.

From this only one conclusion is suggested. If thought's nature is
dependent upon its actual conditions and circumstances, the primary
logical problem is to study thought-in-its-conditioning; it is to detect
the crisis within which thought and its subject-matter present
themselves in their mutual distinction and cross-reference. But Lotze is
so thoroughly committed to a ready-made antecedent of some sort, that
this genetic consideration is of no account to him. The historic method
is a mere matter of psychology, and has no logical worth (Vol. I, p. 2).
We must presuppose a psychological mechanism and psychological material,
but logic is concerned not with origin or history, but with authority,
worth, value (Vol. I, p. 10). Again: "Logic is not concerned with the
manner in which the elements utilized by thought come into existence,
but their value _after_ they have somehow come into existence, for the
carrying out of intellectual operations" (Vol. I, p. 34). And finally:
"I have maintained throughout my work that logic cannot derive any
serious advantage from a discussion of _the conditions under which
thought as a psychological process comes about_. The significance of
logical forms ... is to be found in the utterances of thought, the laws
which it imposes, after or during the act of thinking, not in the
conditions which lie back of and which produce thought."[29]

Lotze, in truth, represents a halting-stage in the evolution of logical
theory. He is too far along to be contented with the reiteration of the
purely formal distinctions of a merely formal thought-by-itself. He
recognizes that thought as formal is the form of some matter, and has
its worth only as organizing that matter to meet the ideal demands of
reason; and that "reason" is in truth only an ideal systematization of
the matter or content. Consequently he has to open the door to admit
"psychical processes" which furnish this material. Having let in the
material, he is bound to shut the door again in the face of the
processes from which the material proceeded--to dismiss them as
impertinent intruders. If thought gets its data in such a surreptitious
manner, there is no occasion for wonder that the legitimacy of its
dealings with the material remains an open question. Logical theory,
like every branch of the philosophic disciplines, waits upon a surrender
of the obstinate conviction that, while the work and aim of thought is
conditioned by the material supplied to it, yet the _worth_ of its
performances is something to be passed upon in complete abstraction from
conditions of origin and development.




IV

THOUGHT AND ITS SUBJECT-MATTER: THE CONTENT AND OBJECT OF THOUGHT


In the foregoing discussion, particularly in the last chapter, we were
led repeatedly to recognize that thought has its own content. At times
Lotze gives way to the tendency to define thought entirely in terms of
modes and forms of activity which are exercised by it upon a strictly
foreign material. But two motives continually push him in the other
direction. (1) Thought has a distinctive work to do, one which involves
a qualitative transformation of (at least) the _relationships_ of the
presented matter; as fast as it accomplishes this work, the
subject-matter becomes somehow thought's own. As we have just seen, the
data are progressively organized to meet thought's ideal of a complete
whole, with its members interconnected according to a determining
principle. Such progressive organization throws backward doubt upon the
assumption of the original total irrelevancy of the data and
thought-form to each other. (2) A like motive operates from the side of
the subject-matter. As merely foreign and external, it is too
heterogeneous to lend itself to thought's exercise and influence. The
idea, as we saw in the first chapter, is the convenient medium through
which Lotze passes from the purely heterogeneous psychical impression or
event, which is totally irrelevant to thought's purpose and working,
over to a state of affairs which can reward thought. Idea as meaning
forms the bridge from the brute factuality of the psychical impression
over to the coherent value of thought's own content.

We have, in this chapter, to consider the question of the idea or
content of thought from two points of view: first, the _possibility_ of
such a content--its consistency with Lotze's fundamental premises;
secondly, its _objective_ character--its validity and test.

I. The question of the possibility of a specific content of thought is
the question of the nature of the idea as meaning. Meaning is the
characteristic content of thought as such. We have thus far left
unquestioned Lotze's continual assumption of meaning as a sort of
thought-unit; the building-stone of thought's construction. In his
treatment of meaning, Lotze's contradictions regarding the antecedents,
data, and content of thought reach their full conclusion. He expressly
makes meaning to be the product of thought's activity and also the
unreflective material out of which thought's operations grow.

This contradiction has been worked out in accurate and complete detail
by Professor Jones.[30] He summarizes it as follows (p. 99): "No other
way was left to him [Lotze] excepting this of first attributing all to
sense and afterwards attributing all to thought, and, finally of
attributing it to thought only because it was already in its material.
This _seesaw_ is essential to his theory; the elements of knowledge as
he describes them can subsist only by the alternate robbery of each
other." We have already seen how strenuously Lotze insists upon the fact
that the given subject-matter of thought is to be regarded wholly as the
work of a physical mechanism, "without any action of thought."[31] But
Lotze also states that if the products of the psychical mechanism "are
to admit of combination in the definite form of a _thought_, they each
require some previous shaping to make them into logical building-stones
and to convert them from _impressions_ into _ideas_. Nothing is really
more familiar to us than this first operation of thought; the only
reason why we usually overlook it is that in the language which we
inherit, it is already carried out, and it seems, therefore, to belong
to the self-evident presuppositions of thought, _not to its own specific
work_."[32] And again (Vol. I, p. 23) judgments "can consist of nothing
but combinations of ideas which are no longer mere impressions: every
such idea must have undergone at least the simple formation mentioned
above." Such ideas are, Lotze goes on to urge, already rudimentary
concepts--that is to say, logical determinations.

The obviousness of the logical contradiction of attributing to a
preliminary specific work of thought exactly the condition of affairs
which is elsewhere explicitly attributed to a psychical mechanism prior
to any thought-activity, should not blind us to its meaning and relative
necessity. The impression, it will be recalled, is a mere state of our
own consciousness--a mood of ourselves. As such it has simply _de facto_
relations as an event to other similar events. But reflective thought is
concerned with the relationship of a content or matter to other
contents. Hence the impression must have a matter before it can come at
all within the sphere of thought's exercise. How shall it secure this?
Why, by a preliminary activity of thought which objectifies the
impression. Blue as a mere sensuous irritation or feeling is given a
quality, the meaning "blue"--blueness; the sense-impression is
objectified; it is presented "no longer as a condition which we undergo,
but as a something which has its being and its meaning in itself, and
which continues to be what it is, and to mean what it means whether we
are conscious of it or not. It is easy to see here the _necessary
beginning of that activity which we above appropriated to thought as
such_: it has not yet got so far as converting coexistence into
coherence. It has first to perform the previous task of investing each
single impression with an independent validity, without which the later
opposition of their real coherence to mere coexistence could not be made
in any intelligible sense."[33]

This objectification, which converts a sensitive state into a sensible
matter to which the sensitive state is referred, also gives this matter
"position," a certain typical character. It is not objectified in a
merely general way, but is given a specific sort of objectivity. Of
these kinds of objectivity there are three mentioned: that of a
substantive content; that of an attached dependent content; that of an
active relationship connecting the various contents with each other. In
short, we have the types of meaning embodied in language in the form of
nouns, adjectives, and verbs. It is through this preliminary formative
activity of thought that reflective or _logical_ thought has presented
to it a world of meanings ranged in an order of relative independence
and dependence, and ranged as elements in a complex of meanings whose
various constituent parts mutually influence each other's meanings.[34]

As usual, Lotze mediates the contradiction between material constituted
_by_ thought and the same material just presented _to_ thought, by a
further position so disparate to each that, taken in connection with
each in a pair, and by turns, it seems to bridge the gulf. After
describing the prior constitutive work of thought as above, he goes on
to discuss a _second_ phase of thought which is intermediary between
this and the third phase, viz., reflective thought proper. This second
activity is that of arranging experienced quales in series and groups,
thus ascribing a sort of universal or common somewhat to various
instances (as already described; see p. 55). On one hand, it is clearly
stated that this second phase of thought's activity is in reality the
_same_ as the first phase: since all objectification involves positing,
since positing involves distinction of one matter from others, and since
this involves placing it in a series or group in which each is
measurably marked off, as to the degree and nature of its diversity,
from every other. We are told that we are only considering "a really
inseparable operation" of thought from two different sides: first, as to
the effect which objectifying thought has upon the matter as set over
against the feeling _subject_, secondly, the effect which this
objectification has upon the matter in relation to _other matters_.[35]
Afterward, however, these two operations are declared to be radically
different in type and nature. The first is determinant and formative; it
gives ideas "the shape without which the logical spirit could not accept
them." In a way it dictates "its own laws to its object-matter."[36] The
second activity of thought is rather passive and receptive. It simply
recognizes what is already there. "Thought can make no difference where
it finds none already in the matter of impressions."[37] "The first
universal, as we saw, can only be experienced in immediate sensation. It
is no product of thought, but something that thought finds already in
existence."[38]

The obviousness of this further contradiction is paralleled only by its
inevitableness. Thought is in the air, is arbitrary and wild in dealing
with meanings, unless it gets its start and cue from actual experience.
Hence the necessity of insisting upon thought's activity as just
recognizing the contents already given. But, on the other hand, prior to
the work of thought there is to Lotze no content or meaning. It requires
a work of thought to detach anything from the flux of sense-irritations
and invest it with a meaning of its own. This dilemma is inevitable to
any writer who declines to consider as correlative the nature of
thought-activity and thought-content from the standpoint of their
generating conditions in the movement of experience. Viewed from such a
standpoint the principle of solution is clear enough. As we have already
seen (p. 53), the internal dissension of an experience leads to
detaching certain values previously absorptively integrated into the
concrete experience as part of its own qualitative coloring; and to
relegating them, for the time being, (pending integration into further
immediate values of a reconstituted experience) into a world of bare
meanings, a sphere qualified as ideal throughout. These meanings then
become the tools of thought in interpreting the data, just as the
sense-qualities which define the presented situation are the immediate
object to thought. The two _as mutually referred_ are content. That is,
the datum and the thought-mode or idea as connected are the object of
thought.

To reach this unification is thought's objective or goal. Exactly the
same value is idea, as either tool or content, according as it is taken
as instrumental or as accomplishment. Every successive cross-section of
the thought-situation presents what may be taken for granted as the
outcome of previous thinking, and consequently as the determinant of
further reflective procedure. Taken as defining the point reached in the
thought-function and serving as constituent unit of further thought, it
is content. Lotze's instinct is sure in identifying and setting over
against each other the material given to thought and the content which
is thought's own "building-stone." His contradictions arise simply from
the fact that his absolute, non-historic method does not permit him to
interpret this joint identity and distinction in a working, and hence
relative, sense.

II. The question of how the possibility of meanings, or
thought-contents, is to be understood merges imperceptibly into the
question of the real objectivity or validity of such contents. The
difficulty for Lotze is the now familiar one: So far as his logic
compels him to insist that these meanings are the possession and product
of thought (since thought is an independent activity), the ideas are
merely ideas; there is no test of objectivity beyond the thoroughly
unsatisfactory and formal one of their own mutual consistency. In
reaction from this Lotze is thrown back upon the idea of these contents
as the original matter given in the impressions themselves. Here there
seems to be an objective or external test by which the reality of
thought's operations may be tried; a given idea is verified or found
false according to its measure of correspondence with the matter of
experience as such. But now we are no better off. The original
independence and heterogeneity of impressions and of thought is so great
that there is no way to compare the results of the latter with the
former. We cannot compare or contrast distinctions of worth with bare
differences of factual existence (Vol. I, p. 2). The standard or test of
objectivity is so thoroughly external that by original definition it is
wholly outside the realm of thought. How can thought compare its own
contents with that which is wholly outside itself?

Or again, the given material of experience apart from thought is
precisely the relatively chaotic and unorganized; it even reduces itself
to a mere sequence of psychical events. What rational meaning is there
in directing us to compare the highest results of scientific inquiry
with the bare sequence of our own states of feeling; or even with the
original data whose fragmentary and uncertain character was the exact
motive for entering upon scientific inquiry? How can the former in any
sense give a check or test of the value of the latter? This is
professedly to test the validity of a system of meanings by comparison
with that whose defects and errors call forth the construction of the
system of meanings by which to rectify and replace themselves. Our
subsequent inquiry simply consists in tracing some of the phases of the
characteristic seesaw from one to the other of the two horns of the now
familiar dilemma: either thought is separate from the matter of
experience, and then its validity is wholly its own private business; or
else the objective results of thought are already in the antecedent
material, and then thought is either unnecessary, or else has no way of
checking its own performances.

1. Lotze assumes, as we have seen, a certain independent validity in
each meaning or qualified content, taken in and of itself. "Blue" has a
certain validity, or meaning, in and of itself; it is an object for
consciousness as such. After the original sense-irritation through which
it was mediated has entirely disappeared, it persists as a valid idea,
as a meaning. Moreover, it is an object or content of thought for others
as well. Thus it has a double mark of validity: in the comparison of one
part of my own experience with another, and in the comparison of my
experience as a whole with that of others. Here we have a sort of
validity which does not raise at all the question of _metaphysical_
reality (Vol. I, pp. 14, 15). Lotze thus seems to have escaped from the
necessity of employing as check or test for the validity of ideas any
reference to a real outside the sphere of thought itself. Such terms as
"conjunction," "franchise," "constitution," "algebraic zero," etc.,
etc., claim to possess objective validity. Yet none of these professes
to refer to a reality beyond thought. Generalizing this point of view,
validity or objectivity of meaning means simply that which is "identical
for all consciousness" (Vol. I, p. 3); "it is quite indifferent whether
certain parts of the world of thought indicate something which has
beside an independent reality outside of thinking minds, or whether all
that it contains exists only in the thoughts of those who think it, but
with equal validity for them all" (Vol. I, p. 16).

So far it seems clear sailing. Difficulties, however, show themselves,
the moment we inquire what is meant by a self-identical content for all
thought. Is this to be taken in a static or in a dynamic way? That is to
say: Does it express the fact that a given content or meaning is _de
facto_ presented to the consciousness of all alike? Does this coequal
presence guarantee an objectivity? Or does validity attach to a given
meaning or content in so far as it directs and controls the further
exercise of thinking, and thus the formation of further _new_ contents
of consciousness?

The former interpretation is alone consistent with Lotze's notion that
the independent idea as such is invested with a certain validity or
objectivity. It alone is consistent with his assertion that concepts
precede judgments. It alone, that is to say, is consistent with the
notion that reflective thinking has a sphere of ideas or meanings
supplied to it at the outset. But it is impossible to entertain this
belief. The stimulus which, according to Lotze, goads thought on from
ideas or concepts to judgments and inferences, is in truth simply the
lack of validity, of objectivity in its original independent meanings or
contents. A meaning as independent is precisely that which is not
invested with validity, but which is a mere idea, a "notion," a fancy,
at best a surmise which may turn out to be valid (and of course this
indicates possible reference); a standpoint to have its value determined
by its further active use. "Blue" as a mere detached floating meaning,
an idea at large, would not gain in validity simply by being entertained
continuously in a given consciousness; or by being made at one and the
same time the persistent object of attentive regard by all human
consciousnesses. If this were all that were required, the chimera, the
centaur, or any other subjective construction, could easily gain
validity. "Christian Science" has made just this notion the basis of its
philosophy.

The simple fact is that in such illustrations as "blue," "franchise,"
"conjunction," Lotze instinctively takes cases which are not mere
independent and detached meanings, but which involve reference to a
region of cosmic experience, or to a region of mutually determining
social activities. The conception that reference to a _social_ activity
does not involve the same sort of reference of thought beyond itself
that is involved in physical matters, and hence may be taken quite
innocent and free of the metaphysical problem of reference to reality
beyond meaning, is one of the strangest that has ever found lodgment in
human thinking. Either both physical and social reference or neither, is
metaphysical; if neither, then it is because the meaning functions, as
it originates, in a specific situation which carries with it its own
tests (see p. 17). Lotze's conception is made possible only by
unconsciously substituting the idea of object as content of thought for
a large number of persons (or a _de facto_ somewhat for every
consciousness), for the genuine definition of object as a determinant in
a scheme of experience. The former is consistent with Lotze's conception
of thought, but wholly indeterminate as to validity or intent. The
latter is the test used experimentally in all concrete thinking, but
involves a radical transformation of all Lotze's assumptions. A given
idea of the conjunction of the franchise, or of blue, is valid, not
because everybody happens to entertain it, but because it expresses the
factor of control or direction in a given movement of experience. The
test of validity of idea[39] is its functional or instrumental use in
effecting the transition from a relatively conflicting experience to a
relatively integrated one. If Lotze's view were correct, "blue" valid
once would be valid always--even when red or green were actually called
for to fulfil specific conditions. This is to say validity always refers
to rightfulness or adequacy of performance in an asserting of
connection--not to the meaning as detached and contemplated.

If we refer again to the fact that the genuine antecedent of thought is
a situation which is tensional as regards its existing status, or
disorganized in its structural elements, yet organized as emerging out
of the unified experience of the past and as striving as a whole, or
equally in all its phases, to reinstate an experience harmonized in
make-up, we can easily understand how certain contents may be detached
and held apart as meanings or references, actual or possible (according
as they are viewed with reference to the past or to the future). We can
understand how such detached contents may be of use in effecting a
review of the entire experience, and as affording standpoints and
methods of a reconstruction which will maintain the integrity of
experience. We can understand how validity of meaning is measured by
reference to something which is not mere meaning; by reference to
something which lies beyond the idea as such--viz., the reconstitution
of an experience into which thought enters as mediator. That paradox of
ordinary experience and of scientific inquiry by which objectivity is
given alike to matter of perception and to conceived relations--to
facts and to laws--affords no peculiar difficulty, because we see that
the test of objectivity is everywhere the same: anything is objective in
so far as, through the medium of conflict, it controls the movement of
experience in its reconstructive transition from one unified form to
another. There is not first an object, whether of sense-perception or of
conception, which afterward somehow exercises this controlling
influence; but the objective is such in virtue of the exercise of
function of control. It may only control the act of inquiry; it may only
set on foot doubt, but this is direction of subsequent experience, and,
in so far, is a token of objectivity.

So much for the thought-content or meaning as having a validity of its
own. It does not have it as isolated or given or static; it has it in
its dynamic reference, its use in determining further movement of
experience. In other words, the "meaning" or idea as such, having been
selected and made-up with reference to performing a certain office in
the evolution of a unified experience, can be tested in no other way
than by discovering whether it does what it was intended to do and what
it purports to do.[40]

2. Lotze has to wrestle with this question of validity in a further
aspect: What constitutes the objectivity of thinking as a total
attitude, activity, or function? According to his own statement, the
meanings or valid ideas are after all only building-stones for logical
thought. Validity is thus not a question of them in their independent
existences, but of their mutual reference to each other. Thinking is the
process of instituting these mutual references; of building up the
various scattered and independent building-stones into the coherent
system of thought. What is the validity of the various forms of thinking
which find expression in the various types of judgment and in the
various forms of inference? Categorical, hypothetical, disjunctive
judgment; inference by induction, by analogy, by mathematical equation;
classification, theory of explanation--all these are processes of
reflection by which mutual connection in an individualized whole is
given to the fragmentary meanings or ideas with which thought as it sets
out is supplied. What shall we say of the validity of such processes?

On one point Lotze is quite clear. These various logical acts do not
really enter into the constitution of the valid world. The logical forms
as such are maintained _only_ in the process of thinking. The world of
valid truth does not undergo a series of contortions and evolutions,
paralleling in any way the successive steps and missteps, the succession
of tentative trials, withdrawals, and retracings, which mark the course
of our own thinking.[41]

Lotze is explicit upon the point that it is only the thought-content in
which the process of thinking issues that has objective validity; the
act of thinking is "purely and simply an inner movement of our own
minds, made necessary to us by reason of the constitution of our nature
and of our place in the world" (Vol. II, p. 279).

Here the problem of validity presents itself as the problem of the
relation of the act of thinking to its own product. In his solution
Lotze uses two metaphors: one derived from building operations, the
other from traveling. The construction of a building requires of
necessity certain tools and extraneous constructions, stagings,
scaffoldings, etc., which are necessary to effect the final
construction, but yet which do not enter into the building as such. The
activity has an instrumental, though not a constitutive, value as
regards its product. Similarly, in order to get a view from the top of a
mountain--this view being the objective--the traveler has to go through
preliminary movements along devious courses. These again are antecedent
prerequisites, but do not constitute a portion of the attained view.

The problem of thought as activity, as distinct from thought as content,
opens up altogether too large a question to receive complete
consideration at this point. Fortunately, however, the previous
discussion enables us to narrow the point which is in issue just here.
It is once more the question whether the activity of thought is to be
regarded as an independent function supervening entirely from without
upon antecedents, and directed from without upon data; or whether it
marks merely a phase of the transformation which the course of
experience (whether practical, or artistic, or socially affectional or
whatever) undergoes in entering into a tensional status where the
maintenance of its harmony of content is problematic and hence an aim.
If it be the latter, a thoroughly intelligent sense can be given to the
proposition that the activity of thinking is instrumental, and that its
worth is found, not in its own successive states as such, but in the
result in which it comes to conclusion. But the conception of thinking
as an independent activity somehow occurring after an independent
antecedent, playing upon an independent subject-matter, and finally
effecting an independent result, presents us with just one miracle the
more.

I do not question the strictly instrumental character of thinking. The
problem lies not here, but in the interpretation of the nature of the
organ and instrument. The difficulty with Lotze's position is that it
forces us into the assumption of a means and an end which are simply and
only external to each other, and yet necessarily dependent upon each
other--a position which, whenever found, is so thoroughly
self-contradictory as to necessitate critical reconsideration of the
premises which lead to it. Lotze vibrates between the notion of thought
as a tool in the external sense, a mere scaffolding to a finished
building in which it has no part nor lot, and the notion of thought as
an immanent tool, as a scaffolding which is an integral part of the very
operation of building, and set up for the sake of the building-activity
which is carried on effectively only with and through a scaffolding.
Only in the former case can the scaffolding be considered as a _mere_
tool. In the latter case the external scaffolding is not itself the
instrumentality; the actual tool is the _action_ of erecting the
building, and this action involves the scaffolding as a constituent part
of itself. The work of erecting is not set over against the completed
building as mere means to an end; it _is_ the end taken in process or
historically, longitudinally viewed. The scaffolding, moreover, is not
an external means to the process of erecting, but an organic member of
it. It is no mere accident of language that "building" has a double
sense--meaning at once the process and the finished product. The outcome
of thought is the thinking activity carried on to its own completion;
the activity, on the other hand, _is_ the outcome taken anywhere short
of its own realization, and thereby still going on.

The only consideration which prevents easy and immediate acceptance of
this view is the notion of thinking as something purely formal. It is
strange that the empiricist does not see that his insistence upon a
matter extraneously given to thought only strengthens the hands of the
rationalist with his claim of thinking as an independent activity,
separate from the actual make-up of the affairs of experience. Thinking
as a merely formal activity exercised upon certain sensations or images
or objects sets forth an absolutely meaningless proposition. The
psychological identification of thinking with the process of association
is much nearer the truth. It is, indeed, on the way to the truth. We
need only to recognize that association is of contents or matters or
meanings, not of ideas as bare existences or events; and that the type
of association we call thinking differs from the associations of casual
fancy and revery in an element of control by reference to an end which
determines the fitness and thus the selection of the associates, to
apprehend how completely thinking is a reconstructive movement of actual
contents of experience in relation to each other, and for the sake of a
redintegration of a conflicting experience.

There is no miracle in the fact that tool and material are adapted to
each other in the process of reaching a valid conclusion. Were they
external in origin to each other and to the result, the whole affair
would, indeed, present an insoluble problem--so insoluble that, if this
were the true condition of affairs, we never should even know that there
was a problem. But, in truth, both material and tool have been secured
and determined with reference to economy and efficiency in effecting the
end desired--the maintenance of a harmonious experience. The builder has
discovered that his building means building tools, and also building
material. Each has been slowly evolved with reference to its fit employ
in the entire function; and this evolution has been checked at every
point by reference to its own correspondent. The carpenter has not
thought at large on his building and then constructed tools at large,
but has thought of his building in terms of the material which enters
into it, and through that medium has come to the consideration of the
tools which are helpful. Life proposes to maintain at all hazards the
unity of its own process. Experience insists on being itself, on
securing integrity even through and by means of conflict.

This is not a formal question, but one of the placing and relations of
the matters or values actually entering into experience. And this in
turn determines the taking up of just those mental attitudes, and the
employing of just those intellectual operations, which most effectively
handle and organize the material. Thinking is adaptation _to_ an end
_through_ the adjustment of particular objective contents.

The thinker, like the carpenter, is at once stimulated and checked in
every stage of his procedure by the particular situation which confronts
him. A person is at the stage of wanting a new house: well then, his
materials are available resources, the price of labor, the cost of
building, the state and needs of his family, profession, etc.; his tools
are paper and pencil and compass, or possibly the bank as a credit
instrumentality, etc. Again, the work is beginning. The foundations are
laid. This in turn determines its own specific materials and tools.
Again, the building is almost ready for occupancy. The concrete process
is that of taking away the scaffolding, clearing up the grounds,
furnishing and decorating rooms, etc. This specific operation again
determines its own fit or relevant materials and tools. It defines the
time and mode and manner of beginning and ceasing to use them. Logical
theory will get along as well as does reflective practice, when it
sticks close by and observes the directions and checks inherent in each
successive phase of the evolution of the cycle of experiencing. The
problem in general of validity of the thinking process as distinct from
the validity of this or that process arises only when thinking is
isolated from its historic position and its material context.

3. But Lotze is not yet done with the problem of validity, even from his
own standpoint. The ground shifts again under his feet. It is no longer
a question of the validity of the idea or meaning with which thought is
supposed to set out; it is no longer a question of the validity of the
process of thinking in reference to its own product; it is the question
of the validity of the product. Supposing, after all, that the final
meaning, or logical idea, is thoroughly coherent and organized;
supposing it is an object for all consciousness as such. Once more
arises the question: What is the validity of even the most coherent and
complete idea?--a question which rises and will not down. We may
reconstruct our notion of the chimera until it ceases to be an
independent idea and becomes a part of the system of Greek mythology.
Has it gained in validity in ceasing to be an independent myth, in
becoming an element in systematized myth? Myth it was and myth it
remains. Mythology does not get validity by growing bigger. How do we
know the same is not the case with the ideas which are the product of
our most deliberate and extended scientific inquiry? The reference again
to the content as the self-identical object of all consciousness proves
nothing; the matter of a hallucination does not gain worth in proportion
to its social contagiousness. Or the reference proves that we have not
as yet reached any conclusion, but are entertaining a hypothesis--since
social validity is not a matter of mere common content, but of securing
participation in a commonly adjudged social experience through action
directed thereto and directed by consensus of judgment.

According to Lotze, the final product is, after all, still thought. Now,
Lotze is committed once for all to the notion that thought, in any form,
is directed by and at an outside reality. The ghost haunts him to the
last. How, after all, does even the ideally perfect valid thought apply
or refer to reality? Its genuine subject is still beyond itself. At the
last Lotze can dispose of this question only by regarding it as a
metaphysical, not a logical, problem (Vol. II, pp. 281, 282). In other
words, _logically_ speaking, we are at the end just exactly where we
were at the beginning--in the sphere of ideas, and of ideas only, plus a
consciousness of the necessity of referring these ideas to a reality
which is beyond them, which is utterly inaccessible to them, which is
out of reach of any influence which they may exercise, and which
transcends any possible comparison with their results. "It is vain,"
says Lotze, "to shrink from acknowledging the circle here involved ...
all we know of the external world depends upon the ideas of it which are
within us" (Vol. II, p. 185). "It is then this varied world of ideas
within us which forms the sole material directly given to us" (Vol. II,
p. 186). As it is the only material given to us, so it is the only
material with which thought can end. To talk about knowing the external
world through ideas which are merely within us is to talk of an inherent
self-contradiction. There is no common ground in which the external
world and our ideas can meet. In other words, the original implication
of a separation between an independent thought-material and an
independent thought-function and purpose lands us inevitably in the
metaphysics of subjective idealism, plus a belief in an unknown reality
beyond, which unknowable is yet taken as the ultimate test of the value
of our ideas as just subjective. The subjectivity of the psychical
event infects at the last the meaning or ideal object. Because it has
been taken to be something "in itself," thought is also something "in
itself," and at the end, after all our maneuvering we are where we
began:--with two separate disparates, one of meaning, but no existence,
the other of existence, but no meaning.

The other aspect of Lotze's contradiction which completes the circle is
clear when we refer to his original propositions, and recall that at the
outset he was compelled to regard the origination and conjunctions of
the impressions, the elements of ideas, as themselves the effects
exercised by a world of things already in existence (see p. 31). He sets
up an independent world of thought, and yet has to confess that both at
its origin and termination it points with absolute necessity to a world
beyond itself. Only the stubborn refusal to take this initial and
terminal reference of thought beyond itself as having a historic
meaning, indicating a particular place of generation and a particular
point of fulfilment in the drama of evolving experience, compels Lotze
to give such bifold objective reference a purely metaphysical turn.

When Lotze goes on to say (Vol. II, p. 191) that the measure of truth of
particular parts of experience is found in asking whether, when judged
by thought, they are in harmony with other parts of experience; when he
goes on to say that there is no sense in trying to compare the entire
world of ideas with a reality which is non-existent, excepting as it
itself should become an idea, Lotze lands where he might better have
frankly commenced.[43] He saves himself from utter skepticism only by
claiming that the explicit assumption of skepticism, the need of
agreement of a ready-made idea as such, with an extraneous independent
material as such, is meaningless. He defines correctly the work of
thought as consisting in harmonizing the various portions of experience
with each other: a definition which has meaning only in connection with
the fact that experience is continually integrating itself into a
wholeness of coherent meaning deepened in significance by passing
through an inner distraction in which by means of conflict certain
contents are rendered partial and hence objectively conscious. In this
case the test of thought is the harmony or unity of experience actually
effected. In that sense the test of reality is beyond thought, as
thought, just as at the other limit thought originates out of a
situation which is not reflectional in character. Interpret this before
and beyond in a historic sense, as an affair of the place occupied and
rôle played by thinking as a function in experience in relation to other
functions, and the intermediate and instrumental character of thought,
its dependence upon unreflective antecedents for its existence, and upon
a consequent experience for its test of final validity, becomes
significant and necessary. Taken at large, it plunges us in the depths
of a hopelessly complicated and self-revolving metaphysic.




V

A CRITICAL STUDY OF BOSANQUET'S THEORY OF JUDGMENT[44]


Bosanquet's theory of the judgment, in common with all such theories of
the judgment, necessarily involves the metaphysical problem of the
nature of reality and of the relation of thought to reality. That the
judgment is the function by which knowledge is attained is a proposition
which would meet with universal acceptance. But knowledge is itself a
relation of some sort between thought and reality. The view which any
logician adopts as to the nature of the knowledge-process is accordingly
conditioned by his metaphysical presuppositions as to the nature of
reality. It is equally true that the theory of the judgment developed
from any metaphysical standpoint serves as a test of the validity of
that standpoint. We shall attempt in the present paper to show how
Bosanquet's theory of the judgment develops from his view of the nature
of reality, and to inquire whether the theory succeeds in giving such an
account of the knowledge-process as to corroborate the presupposition
underlying it.

Bosanquet defines judgment as "the intellectual function which defines
reality by significant ideas and in so doing affirms the reality of
those ideas" (p. 104).[45] The form of the definition suggests the
nature of his fundamental problem. There is, on the one hand, a world
of reality which must be regarded as having existence outside of and
independently of the thoughts or ideas we are now applying to it; and
there is, on the other hand, a world of ideas whose value is measured by
the possibility of applying them to reality, of qualifying reality by
them. The judgment is the function which makes the connection between
these two worlds. If judgment merely brought one set of ideas into
relation with another set, then it could never give us anything more
than purely hypothetical knowledge whose application to the real world
would remain forever problematic. It would mean that knowledge is
impossible, a result which seems to be contradicted by the existence of
knowledge. The logician must, therefore, as Bosanquet tells us, regard
it as an essential of the act of judgment that it always refers to a
reality which goes beyond and is independent of the act itself (p. 104).
His central problem thus becomes that of understanding what the nature
of reality is which permits of being defined by ideas, and what the
nature of an idea is that it can ever be affirmed to be real. How does
the real world get representation in experience, and what is the
guarantee that the representation, when obtained, is correct?

The defining of the problem suggests the view of the nature of reality
out of which Bosanquet's theory of the judgment grows. The real world is
to him a world which has its existence quite independently of the
process by which it is known. The real world is there to be known, and
is in no wise modified by the knowledge which we obtain of it. The work
of thought is to build up a world of ideas which shall represent, or
correspond to, the world of reality. The more complete and perfect the
correspondence, the greater our store of knowledge.

Translated into terms of the judgment, this representational view means
that the subject of the judgment must always be reality, while the
predicate is an idea. But when we examine the content of any universal
judgment, or even of an ordinary judgment of perception, the subject
which appears in the judgment is evidently not reality at all, if by
reality we mean something which is in no sense constituted by the
thought-process. When I say, "The tree is green," the subject, tree,
cannot be regarded as a bit of reality which is given ready-made to the
thought-process. The ability to perceive a tree, to distinguish it from
other objects and single it out for the application of an idea,
evidently implies a long series of previous judgments. The content
"tree" is itself ideal. As Bosanquet forcibly states it: "If a sensation
or elementary perception is in consciousness (and if not we have nothing
to do with it in logic), it already bears the form of thinking" (p. 33).
How, then, can it serve as the subject of a judgment? Bosanquet's
solution of the problem is to say that the real subject of a judgment is
not the grammatical subject which appears in a proposition, but reality
itself. In the more complex forms of judgment the reference to reality
is disguised by the introduction of explicit ideas to designate the
portion of reality to which reference is made (pp. 78, 79). In the
simplest type of judgment known, however, the qualitative judgment of
perception, the reference to reality appears within the judgment itself.
The relations of thought to reality and of the elements of the judgment
to one another can, accordingly, most readily be seen in the
consideration of this rudimentary form of judgment in which the various
parts lie bare before us.

Bosanquet describes it as follows:

    If I say, pointing to a particular house, "That is my home," it is
    clear that in this act of judgment the reference conveyed by the
    demonstrative is indispensable. The significant idea "my home" is
    affirmed, not of any other general significant idea in my mind,
    but of something which is rendered unique by being present to me
    in perception. In making the judgment, "That is my home," I extend
    the present sense-perception of a house in a certain landscape by
    attaching to it the ideal content or meaning of "home;" and
    moreover, in doing this, I pronounce the ideal content to be, so
    to speak, of one and the same tissue with what I have before me in
    my actual perception. That is to say, I affirm the meaning of the
    idea, or the idea considered as a meaning, to be a real quality of
    that which I perceive in my perception.

    The same account holds good of every perceptive judgment; when I
    see a white substance on a plate and judge that "it is bread" I
    affirm the reference, or general meaning which constitutes the
    symbolic idea "bread" in my mind, to be a real quality of the spot
    or point in present perception which I attempt to designate by the
    demonstrative "this." The act defines the given but indefinite
    real by affirmation of a quality, and affirms reality of the
    definite quality by attaching it to the previously undefined real.
    Reality is given for me _in_ present sensuous perception, and _in_
    the immediate feeling of my own sentient existence that goes with
    it. (Pp. 76, 77.)

Again, he says that the general features of the judgment of perception
are as follows:

    There is a presence of a something in contact with our sensitive
    self, which, as being so in contact, has the character of reality;
    and there is the qualification of this reality by the reference to
    it of some meaning _such as can_ be symbolized by a name (p. 77).

Our point of contact with reality, the place where reality gets into the
thought-process, is, according to this view, to be found in the
simplest, most indefinite type of judgment of perception. We meet with
reality in the mere undefined "this" of primitive experience. But each
such elementary judgment about an undefined "this" is an isolated bit of
experience. Each "this" could give us only a detached bit of reality at
best, and the further problem now confronts us of how we ever succeed in
piecing our detached bits of reality together to form a real world.
Bosanquet's explanation is, in his words, this:

    The real world, as a definite organized system, is _for me_ an
    extension of this present sensation and self-feeling by means of
    judgment, and it is the essence of judgment to effect and sustain
    such an extension (p. 77).

Again he says:

    The subject in every judgment of Perception is some given spot or
    point in sensuous contact with the percipient self. But, as all
    reality is continuous, the subject is not _merely_ this given spot
    or point. It is impossible to confine the real world within this
    or that presentation. Every definition or qualification of a point
    in present perception is affirmed of the real world which is
    continuous with present perception. The ultimate subject of the
    perceptive judgment is the real world as a whole, and it is of
    this that, in judging, we affirm the qualities or characteristics.
    (P. 78.)

The problem is the same as that with which Bradley struggles in his
treatment of the subject of the judgment, and the solution is also the
same. Bradley's treatment of the point is perhaps somewhat more
explicit. Like Bosanquet, he starts with the proposition that the
subject of the judgment must be reality itself and not an idea, because,
if it were the latter, judgment could never give us anything but a union
of ideas, and a union of ideas remains forever universal and
hypothetical. It can never acquire the uniqueness, the singularity,
which is necessary to make it refer to the real. Uniqueness can be found
only in our contact with the real. But just where does our contact with
the real occur? Bradley recognizes the fact that it cannot be the
_content_--even in the case of a simple sensation--which gives us
reality. The content of a sensation is a thing which is in my
consciousness, and which has the form which it presents because it is in
my consciousness. Reality is precisely something which is not itself
sensation, and cannot be in my consciousness. If I say, "This is white,"
the "this" has a content which is a sensation of whiteness. But the
sensation of whiteness is not reality. The experience brings with it an
assurance of reality, not because its content is the real, but because
it is "my direct encounter in sensible presentation with the real
world."[46] To make the matter clearer, Bradley draws a distinction
between the _this_ and the _thisness_. In every experience, however
simple, there is a content--a "thisness"--which is not itself unique.
Considered merely as content, it is applicable to an indefinite number
of existences; in other words, it is an idea. But there is also in every
experience a "this" which is unique, but which is not a content. It is a
mere sign of existence which gives the experience uniqueness, but
nothing else. The "thisness" falls on the side of the content, and the
"this" on the side of existence. It is exactly the distinction which
Bosanquet has in mind in the passages quoted in which he tells us that
"reality is given for me _in_ present sensuous perception, and _in_ the
immediate feeling of my own sentient existence which goes with it;" and
again when he says: "There is a presence of a something in contact with
our sensitive self, which, as being so in contact, has the character of
reality." The same point is made somewhat more explicitly in his
introduction when he says that the individual's present perception is
not, indeed, reality as such, but is his present point of contact with
reality as such (p. 3).

But has this distinction between the content of an experience and its
existence solved the problem of how we _know_ reality? When Bosanquet
talks of knowing reality, he means possessing ideas which are an
accurate reproduction of reality. It is still far from clear how,
according to his own account, we could ever have any assurance that our
ideas do represent reality accurately, if we can nowhere find a point
at which the content of an experience can be held to give us reality.
The case is still worse when we go beyond the problem of how any
particular bit of reality can be known, and ask ourselves how reality as
a whole can be known. The explanation offered by both Bradley and
Bosanquet is that by means of judgment we extend the bit of reality of
whose existence we get a glimpse through a peep-hole in the curtain of
sensuous perception, and thus build up the organized system of reality.
In a passage previously quoted, Bosanquet tells us that all reality is
continuous, and therefore the real subject of a judgment cannot be the
mere spot or point which is given in sensuous perception, but must be
the real world as a whole. But how does he know that reality is
continuous, and that the real world is an organized system? Our only
knowledge of reality comes through judgment, and judgment brings us into
contact with reality only at isolated points. When he tells us that
reality is a continuous whole, he does so on the basis of a metaphysical
presupposition which is not justifiable by his theory of the judgment.
The only statement about reality which could be maintained on the basis
of his theory is that some sort of a reality exists, but the theory
furnishes equal justification for the assurance that this reality is of
such a nature that we can never know anything more about it than the
bare fact of its existence. Moreover, the bare fact of the existence of
reality comes to us merely in the form of a feeling of our own sentient
existence which goes with sense-perception. But the mere assurance that
somewhere behind the curtain of sensuous perception reality exists (even
if this could go unchallenged), accompanied by the certainty that we can
never by any possibility know anything more about it, is practically
equivalent to the denial of the possibility of knowledge.[47]

Although the denial of the possibility of knowledge seems to be the
logical outcome of the premises, it is not the conclusion reached by
Bosanquet. At the outset of his treatise, Bosanquet propounds the
fundamental question we have been considering in these words: "How does
the analysis of knowledge as a systematic function, or system of
functions, explain that relationship in which truth appears to consist,
between the human intelligence on the one hand, and fact or reality on
the other?" His answer is: "To this difficulty there is only one reply.
If the object-matter of reality lay genuinely outside the system of
thought, not only our analysis, but thought itself, would be unable to
lay hold of reality." (Pp. 2, 3.) The statement is an explicit
recognition of the impossibility of bridging the chasm between a reality
outside the content of knowledge and a known real world. It brings
before us the dilemma contained in Bosanquet's treatment of the subject
of the judgment. On the one hand the subject of the judgment must be
outside the realm of my thoughts. If it were not, judgment would merely
establish a relation between my ideas and would give me no knowledge of
the real world. On the other hand, the subject of the judgment must be
within the realm of my thoughts. If it were not, I could never assert
anything of it; could never judge, or know it. The stress he lays on the
first horn of the dilemma has been shown. It remains to show his
recognition of the second horn, and to find out whether or not he
discovers any real reconciliation between the two.

Bosanquet sums up the section of the introduction on knowledge and its
content, truth, with the following paragraph:

    The real world for every individual is thus emphatically _his_
    world; an extension and determination of his present perception,
    which perception is to him not indeed reality as such, but his
    point of contact with reality as such. Thus in the enquiry which
    will have to be undertaken as to the logical subject of the
    judgment, we shall find that the subject, however it may shift,
    contract, and expand, is always in the last resort some greater or
    smaller element of this determinate reality, which the individual
    has constructed by identifying significant ideas with that world
    of which he has assurance through his own perceptive experience.
    In analyzing common judgment it is ultimately one to say that _I
    judge_ and that _the real world for me, my real world, extends
    itself_, or maintains its organized extension. This is the
    ultimate connection by which the distinction of subject and
    predication is involved in the act of affirmation or enunciation
    which is the differentia of judgment. (Pp. 3, 4).

Here the subject of the judgment appears as an element of a reality
_which the individual has constructed_ by identifying significant ideas
with that world of which he has assurance through his own perceptive
experience. But the very point with reference to the subject of the
judgment previously emphasized is that it is not and cannot be something
which the individual has constructed. The subject of the judgment must
be reality, and reality does not consist of ideas, even if it be
determined by them. It does not mend matters to explain that the
individual has constructed his real world by identifying significant
ideas with that world of which he has assurance through his own
perceptive experiences, because, as we have seen, "the individual's
perceptive experiences" either turn out to be merely similar mental
constructions made at a prior time, so that nothing is gained by
attaching to them, or else they mean once more the mere shock of contact
which is supposed to give assurance that some sort of reality exists,
but which gives no assurance of what it is. That and what, this and
thisness still remain detached. When he talks of _the real world for any
individual_ we are left entirely in the dark as to what the relation
between _the real world as it is for any individual_ and _the real
world as it is for itself_ may be, or how the individual is to gain any
assurance that _the real world as it is for him_ represents _the real
world as it is for itself_.

Another attempt at a reconciliation of these opposing views leaves us no
better satisfied. The passage is as follows:

    The real world, as a definite organized system, is _for me_ an
    extension of this present sensation and self-feeling by means of
    judgment, and it is the essence of judgment to effect and sustain
    such an extension. It makes no essential difference whether the
    ideas whose content is pronounced to be an attribute of reality
    appear to fall within what is given in perception, or not. We
    shall find hereafter that it is vain to attempt to lay down
    boundaries between the given and its extension. The moment we try
    to do this we are on the wrong track. The given and its extension
    differ not absolutely but relatively; they are continuous with
    each other, and the metaphor by which we speak of an extension
    conceals from us that the so-called "given" is no less artificial
    than that by which it is extended. It is the character and quality
    of being directly in contact with sense-perception, not any fixed
    datum of content, that forms the constantly shifting center of the
    individual's real world, and spreads from that center over every
    extension which the system of reality receives from judgment. (P.
    77.)

In this passage by the "given" he evidently means the content of sensory
experience, the thisness, the what. It is, as he says, of the same stuff
as that by which it is extended. Both the given and that by which it is
extended are artificial in the sense of not being _real_ according to
Bosanquet's interpretation of reality; they are ideas. But if all this
is admitted, what becomes of the possibility of knowledge? Bosanquet
undertakes to rescue it by assuring us again that it is the character
and quality of being directly in contact with sense-perception, not any
fixed datum of content, that forms the center of the individual's real
world and gives the stamp of reality to his otherwise ideal extension of
this center. Here again we find ourselves with no evidence that the
_content_ of our knowledge bears any relation to reality. We have merely
the feeling of vividness attached to sensory experience which seems to
bring us the certainty that there is some sort of a reality behind it,
but this is not to give assurance that our ideal content even belongs
rightfully to that against which we have bumped, much less of _how_ it
belongs--and only this deserves the title "knowledge."

In the chapter on "Quality and Comparison," in which he takes up the
more detailed treatment of the simplest types of judgment of perception,
he comes back to the same contradiction, and again attempts to explain
how both horns of his dilemma must be true. The passage is this:

    The Reality to which we ascribe the predicate is undoubtedly
    self-existent; it is not _merely_ in my mind or in my act of
    judgment; if it were, the judgment would only be a game with my
    ideas. It is well to make this clear in the case before us, for in
    the later forms of the judgment it will be much disguised. Still
    the reality which attracts my concentrated attention is also
    within my act of judgment; it is not even the whole reality
    present to my perception; still less of course the whole
    self-existent Reality which I dimly presuppose. The immediate
    subject of the judgment is a mere aspect, too indefinite to be
    described by explicit ideas except in as far as the qualitative
    predication imposes a first specification upon it. _This_ Reality
    _is_ in my judgment; it is the point at which the actual world
    impinges upon my consciousness as real, and it is only by judging
    with reference to this point that I can refer the ideal content
    before my mind to the whole of reality which I at once believe to
    exist, and am attempting to construct. The Subject is both in and
    out of the Judgment, as Reality is both in and out of my
    consciousness. (Pp. 113, 114.)

The conclusion he reaches is a mere restatement of the difficulty. The
problem he is trying to solve is how the subject _can_ be both in and
out of the judgment, and how the subject without is related to the
subject within. The mere assertion that it is so does not help us to
understand it. His procedure seems like taking advantage of two
meanings of sense-perception, its conscious quality and its brute abrupt
immediacy, and then utilizing this ambiguity to solve a problem which
grows out of the conception of judgment as a reference of idea to
reality.

Turning from his treatment of the world of fact to his discussion of the
world of idea, from the subject to the predicate, as it appears in his
theory of the judgment we find again a paradox which must be recognized
and cannot be obviated. An idea is essentially a meaning. It is not a
particular existence whose essence is uniqueness as is the case with the
subject of the judgment, but is a meaning whose importance is that it
may apply to an indefinite number of unique existences. Its
characteristic is universality. And yet an idea regarded as a psychical
existence, an idea as a content in my mind, is just as particular and
unique as any other existence. How, then, does it obtain its
characteristic of universality? Bosanquet's answer is that it must be
universal by means of a reference to something other than itself. Its
meaning resides, not in its existence as a psychical image, but in its
reference to something beyond itself. Now, any idea that is affirmed is
referred to reality, but do ideas exist which are not being affirmed? If
so, their reference cannot be to reality. Bosanquet discusses the
question in the second section of his introduction as follows:

    It is not easy to deny that there is a world of ideas or of
    meanings, which simply consists in that identical reference of
    symbols by which mutual understanding between rational beings is
    made possible. A _mere_ suggestion, a _mere_ question, a _mere_
    negation, seem all of them to imply that we sometimes _entertain_
    ideas without affirming them of reality, and therefore without
    affirming their reference to be a reference to something real or
    their meaning to be fact. We may be puzzled indeed to say what an
    idea can mean, or to what it can refer, if it does not mean or
    refer to something real--to some element in the fabric
    continuously sustained by the judgment which is our consciousness.
    On the other hand, it would be shirking a difficulty to neglect
    the consideration that an idea, while denied of reality, may
    nevertheless, or even must, possess an identical and so
    intelligible reference--a symbolic value--for the rational beings
    who deny it. A reference, it may be argued, must be a reference to
    something. But it seems as if in this case the something were the
    fact of reference itself, the rational convention between
    intelligent beings, or rather the world which has existence,
    whether for one rational being or for many, merely as contained in
    and sustained by such intellectual reference.

    I only adduce these considerations in order to explain that
    transitional conception of an objective world or world of
    meanings, distinct from the real world or world of facts, with
    which it is impossible wholly to dispense in an account of thought
    starting from the individual subject. The paradox is that the real
    world or world of fact thus seems for us to fall within and be
    included in the objective world or world of meanings, as if all
    that is fact were meaning, but not every meaning were fact. This
    results in the contradiction that something is objective, which is
    not real. (Pp. 4, 5.)

In the seventh section of the introduction Bosanquet explains his
meaning further by what the reader is privileged to regard as a flight
of the imagination--a mere simile--which he thinks may, nevertheless,
make the matter clearer.

    We might try to think that the world, _as known to each of us_, is
    constructed and sustained by his individual consciousness; and
    that every other individual also frames for himself, and sustains
    by the action of his intelligence, the world in which he in
    particular lives and moves. Of course such a construction is to be
    taken as a reconstruction, a construction by way of knowledge
    only; but for our present purpose this is indifferent. Thus we
    might think of the ideas and objects of our private world rather
    as corresponding to than as from the beginning identical with
    those which our fellow-men are occupied in constructing each
    within his own sphere of consciousness. And the same would be true
    even of the objects and contents within our own world, in as far
    as an act or effort would be required to maintain them, of the
    same kind with that which was originally required to construct
    them.... Thus the paradox of reference would become clearer. We
    should understand that we refer to a correspondence by means of a
    content. We should soften down the contradiction of saying that a
    name to meet which we have and can get nothing but an idea,
    nevertheless does not stand for that idea but for something else.
    We should be able to say that the name stands for those elements
    in the idea which correspond in all our separate worlds, and in
    our own world of yesterday and of today, considered as so
    corresponding. (Pp. 45, 46.)

According to this view, the idea obtains the universality which
constitutes it an idea by a sort of process of elimination. It is like a
composite photograph. It selects only the common elements in a large
number of particular existences, and thus succeeds in representing, or
referring to, all the particular existences which have gone to make it
up. But when we come to consider the bearing which this view of
universality, or generalized significance, has on our estimate of the
knowledge-process, we feel that it has not solved the problem for us. In
the first place, the idea _in its existence_ is just as particular when
regarded as made up of the common elements of many ideas as is any of
the ideas whose elements are taken. A composite photograph is just as
much a single photograph as any one of the photographs which are taken
to compose it. The chasm between the particularity of the psychical
image and the universality of its meaning is not bridged by regarding
the content of the image as made up by eliminating unlike elements in a
number of images. The stuff with which thought has to work is still
nothing more than a particular psychical image, and the problem of what
gives it its logical value as a general significance is still unsolved.
Nor does it seem possible to find anything in the _existence_ of the
image which could account for its reference to something outside of
itself. The _fact_ of reference itself becomes an ultimate mystery.[48]

But even waiving this difficulty, the judgment must still
appear truncated, if it really totally disregard a part of its
content--_i. e._, the particular existence of the image as part of the
judging consciousness. The theory holds that the particular existence of
the image has no logical value. It is only its meaning, or general
reference, which has logical value. But the image _qua_ image is just as
real as that to which it is supposed to refer. If the judgment really
does ignore its existence, then it ignores a portion of the reality it
attempts to represent, and stands self-confessed as a failure.[49] At
still another point, ideas, as Bosanquet represents them, prove to be
unsatisfactory tools to use in the work of building up reality. In
Bosanquet's words: "The meaning tyrannizes over the psychical image in
another respect. Besides crushing out of sight its particular and
exclusive existence, it also crushes out part of its content" (p. 74).
The idea, as we use it, is not, as to content, a complete or accurate
representation of anything real. To take Bosanquet's illustration:

    Some one speaks to me of the Ægean sea, which I have never seen.
    He tells me that it is a deep blue sea under a cloudless sky,
    studded with rocky islands. The meanings of these words are a
    problem set to my thought. I have to meet him in the world of
    objective references, which as intelligent beings we have in
    common. How I do this is my own affair, and the precise images at
    my command will vary from day to day, and from minute to minute.
    It sounds simple to say that I combine my recollections of sea and
    sky at Torbay with those of the island-studded waters of Orkney
    or the Hebrides. Even so, there is much to adjust and to neglect;
    the red cliffs of Torbay, and the cloudy skies of the north. But
    then again, my recollections are already themselves symbolic
    ideas; the reference to Torbay or the Hebrides is itself a problem
    set to thought, and puts me upon the selection of index-elements
    in fugitive images that are never twice the same. I have _first_
    to symbolize the color of Torbay, using for the purpose any blue
    that I can call to mind, and fixing, correcting, subtracting from,
    the color so recalled, till I reduce it to a mere index quality;
    and _then_ I have to deal in the same way with the meaning or
    significant idea so obtained, clipping and adjusting the qualities
    of Torbay till it seems to serve as a symbol of the Ægean. (Pp.
    74, 75.)

And by the time all this is performed what sort of a representation of
reality is the idea? Evidently a very poor and meager and fragmentary
one.

It is so poor and fragmentary, that it cannot itself be that which is
affirmed of reality. It must be some other fuller existence to be found
in the world of meanings which is affirmed. And yet how the meager
content of the idea succeeds in referring to the world of meanings, and
acting as the instrument for referring a meaning to reality, is not at
all clear. It seems impossible to explain reference intelligibly by the
concept of a _correspondence_ of contents.

The fundamental difficulty in the interpretation of the predicate is the
same one that we encountered in the interpretation of the subject. If
the predicate is to be affirmed of reality (and if it be not, it has no
logical value), then it must, when affirmed, be in some sense an
accurate representation of reality. But the predicate is an idea, and,
moreover, an idea which is, both in its existence and in its meaning
palpably the outcome of transformations wrought upon given sensory
contents by the individual consciousness. Since the one point of contact
with reality is in sensory experience, the more simple sensory
experiences are reacted upon and worked over, the farther they recede
from reality. The idea seems, therefore, in its very essence, a thing
which never can be affirmed of reality. As image it is itself a reality,
but not affirmed; as meaning it is that reality (the image) manipulated
for individual ends. Why suppose that by distorting reality we get it in
shape to affirm _of_ reality? Moreover, the farther an idea is removed
from immediate sensory experience--in other words, the more abstract it
becomes--the less is the possibility of affirming it of reality. The
final outcome of this point of view, if we adhere rigorously to its
logic is that the more thinking we do, the less we know about the real
world. Bosanquet avoids this conclusion by a pure act of faith. If
knowledge is to be rescued, we must believe that the work done by
consciousness upon the bits of reality given in sensory experience
really does succeed in building up a knowledge of reality for us. As
Bosanquet puts it: "The presentation of Reality, qualified by an ideal
content, is one aspect of Subject and Predication; and my individual
percipient consciousness determining itself by a symbolic idea is the
other. That the latter is identified with the former follows from the
claim of conscious thought that its nature is to know."[50] (P. 83.)

To sum up the situation, Bosanquet starts out with the assumption that
by knowledge we must mean knowledge of a world entirely independent of
our ideas. If we fail to make this assumption, knowledge becomes merely
a relation between ideas. But its whole importance seems to us to rest
on the conviction that it does give us knowledge of a world which is
what it is quite independently of our ideas about it, and cannot in any
sense be modified by what we think about it. What knowledge does is to
give us a copy or representation of the real world, whose value depends
on the accuracy of the representation. And yet when we examine any
individual knowing consciousness, the subject which appears within the
judgment is never some portion of the world which exists outside of the
knowing consciousness, but always some portion of the world which exists
within the knowing consciousness, and which is constituted by the
knowledge process. The predicate which is affirmed of reality is
constantly found to derive its meaning, its generalized significance,
not from its correspondence with, or reference to, the real world
outside of the knowing consciousness, but from reference to a world of
meanings, which consists in a sort of convention among rational
beings--a world whose existence is distinctly within the knowing
consciousness and not outside of it.[51] Between the real world, as
Bosanquet conceives it, and the world of knowledge, we find inserted on
the side of the subject, the world _as known to each of us_, and on the
side of the predicate, the _objective world of meanings_. Neither of
these is the real world. Both of them are ideal, _i. e._, are
constructions of the individual consciousness. We nowhere find any
satisfactory explanation of how these ideal worlds are related to the
real world. There is merely the assertion that we must believe that they
represent the real world in order that we may believe that knowledge
exists. But the fact remains that whenever we try to analyze and explain
any particular judgment, what we find ourselves dealing with is always
the world as it exists to us as subject, and the objective world of
meanings as predicate. If we stop here, then knowledge turns out to be
just what Bosanquet asserted at the outset that it was _not, i. e._, a
relation between ideas. When we demand a justification for going farther
than this, we find none except the claim of conscious thought that its
nature is to know--a claim whose justice we have no possible means of
testing, and which would not, even if admitted, be of the slightest
value in deciding which _particular_ judgment is true and which false.

Bosanquet's development of his subject has proved to be throughout the
necessary logical outcome of the presuppositions with reference to
reality from which he starts. The fundamental difficulty of erecting a
theory of the knowledge-process upon such a basis is recognized by him
at the start in a passage already quoted: "If the object-matter of
reality lay genuinely outside the system of thought, not only our
analysis, but thought itself, would be unable to lay hold of reality"
(p. 2). But, in spite of this assertion, his fundamental conception of
reality remains that of a system which does lie outside the
thought-process. His theory is an attempt to reconcile the essentially
irreconcilable views that reality is outside of the thought-process, and
that it is inside of the thought-process, and he succeeds only by
calling upon our faith that so it is.

If it be true, as it seems to him to be, that we are compelled to adhere
to both of these views of reality, then surely there is no other
outcome. It means, however, that we finally resign all hope of _knowing_
reality. We may _have faith_ in its existence, but we have no way of
deciding what particular judgment has reality in it as it should have
it, and what as it should not. All stand (and fall) on the same basis.
But does not Bosanquet himself point out a pathway which, if followed
farther, would reach a more satisfactory view of the realm of knowledge?
He has shown us that the only sort of reality _we know_, or can know, is
the reality which appears within our judgment-process--the reality as
known to us. Would it not be possible to drop the presupposed reality
outside of the judgment-process (with which judgment is endeavoring to
make connectio

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