Studies in Logical Theory Part 3

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 a.s.sumption 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 pa.s.ses 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 a.s.sumption 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 const.i.tuent parts mutually influence each other's meanings.[34]

As usual, Lotze mediates the contradiction between material const.i.tuted _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 const.i.tutive 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 pa.s.sive 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 reconst.i.tuted 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 const.i.tuent 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 ident.i.ty 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 a.s.sumes, 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," "const.i.tution," "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 a.s.sertion 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 subst.i.tuting 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 a.s.sumptions. 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 a.s.serting 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 reconst.i.tution 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 const.i.tutes the objectivity of thinking as a total att.i.tude, 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 inst.i.tuting 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 a.n.a.logy, by mathematical equation; cla.s.sification, 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 const.i.tution 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 const.i.tution 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 const.i.tutive, 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 const.i.tute 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 a.s.sumption 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 const.i.tuent 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 a.s.sociation is much nearer the truth. It is, indeed, on the way to the truth. We need only to recognize that a.s.sociation is of contents or matters or meanings, not of ideas as bare existences or events; and that the type of a.s.sociation we call thinking differs from the a.s.sociations 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 a.s.sociates, 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 att.i.tudes, 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 compa.s.s, 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 partic.i.p.ation 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 a.s.sumption 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 pa.s.sing 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 role 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 const.i.tuted 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.