Whenever and wherever it was discovered that the content of experience
as given in immediate perception could be reconstructed through ideas,
then and there began to emerge such questions as these: What is the
significance of this reconstructive power? What is the relation between
it and the immediate experience? What is the relative value of each in
experience as a whole? What is their relation to truth and error? If
thinking leads to truth, and thought must yet get its material from
perception, how then shall the product of thought escape infection from
the material? On the other hand, if truth is to be found in the
immediate experience, can it here be preserved from the blighting
effects of thought? For so insistent and pervasive is this activity of
thought that it appears to penetrate into the sanctum of perception
itself. Turning to a third possibility, if it should be found that truth
and error are concerned with both--that they are products of the
combined activity of perception and reflection--then just what does each
do? And what in their operations marks the difference between truth and
error? Or still again, if truth and error cannot be found in the
operations of perception and reflection as such, then they must be
located in the relation of these processes to something else. If so,
what is this something else? Out of such questions as these is logic
born.
There may be those who will object to some of these questions as
"logical" problems--those who would limit logic to a description of the
forms and processes of reconstruction, relegating the question of the
criterion of truth and error to "epistemology." This objection we must
here dismiss summarily by saying that, by whatever name it is called, a
treatment of the forms and processes of thought must deal with the
criterion of truth and error, since these different "forms" are just
those which thought assumes in attempting to reach truth under different
conditions.
Certainly in the beginning the Greeks regarded their newly discovered
power of thought as anything but formal. Indeed, it soon became so
"substantial" that it was regarded as simply a new world of fact, of
existence alongside of, or rather above, the world of perception. But
Socrates hailed ideas as deliverers from the contradictions and
paradoxes into which experience interpreted in terms of immediate
sense-perception had fallen. In the concept Socrates found a solution
for the then pressing problems of social life. The Socratic universal is
not a mere empty form which thought imposes upon the world. It is
something which thought creates in order that a life of social
interaction and reciprocity may go on. This need not mean that the
Greeks were reflectively conscious of this, but that this was the way
the concept was actually used and developed by Socrates.
In attempting to formulate the relation between this new world of ideas
and immediate sense-experience, Plato constructed his scheme of
substantiation and participation. The Platonic doctrine of
substantiation and participation is an expression of the conviction that
anything so valuable as Socrates had shown ideas to be could not be
merely formal or unreal. Up to the discovery of these ideas reality lay
in the "substances" of perception. Hence in order to have that reality
to which their worth, their value in life, entitled them, the ideas must
be substantiated.
This introduction of the newly discovered ideas into the world of
substances and reality wrought, of course, a change in the conception
of the latter--a change which has well-nigh dominated the entire
philosophic development ever since. Let us recall that the aim of
Socrates was to find something that would prevent society from going to
pieces under the influence of the disintegrating conception of
experience as a mere flux of given immediate content. Now, in the
concepts Socrates discovered the basis for just this much-needed
wholeness and stability. Moreover, the fact that unity and stability
were the actual social needs of the hour led not only to the concepts
which furnished them being conceived as substantial and real, but to
their being regarded as a higher type of reality, as "more real" than
the given, immediate experiences of perception. They were higher and
more real because, just then, they answered the pressing social need.
The ideas supplied this unity because they furnished ends, purposes, to
the given material of perception. The given is now given for something;
for something more, too, than mere contemplation. Socrates also showed,
by the most acute analysis, that the content of these ends, these
purposes, was social through and through.
From the ethical standpoint this teleological character of the idea is
clearly recognized. But as "real," the ideas must be stated in the
metaphysical terms of substance and attribute. Here the social need is
abstracted from and lost to sight. The fundamental attributes of the
ideas are now a metaphysical unity and stability. Hence unity and
stability, wholeness and completeness, are the very essence of reality,
while multiplicity and change constitute the nature of appearance. Thus
does Plato's reality become, as Windelband says, "an immaterial
eleaticism which seeks true being in the ideas without troubling itself
about the world of generation and occurrence which it leaves to
perception and opinion."[164]
Now it is the momentum of this conception of reality as a stable and
complete system of absolute ideas, the development of which we have just
roughly sketched, that is so important historically. Why this conception
of reality, which apparently grew out of a particular historical
situation, should have dominated philosophic theory for over two
thousand years appears at first somewhat puzzling. Those who still hold
and defend it will of course say that this survival is evidence of its
validity. But, after all, our human world may be yet very young. It may
be that "a thousand years are but as yesterday." At any rate philosophy
has never been in a hurry to reconstruct conceptions which served their
day and generation with such distinction as did the Platonic conception
of reality. And this is true to the evolutionary instinct that
experience has only its own products as material for further
construction. On the other hand, the principle of evolution with equal
force demands that only as _material_, not as final forms of experience,
shall these products continue. It may be that philosophy has not yet
taken the conception of evolution quite seriously. At all events it is
certain that long after it has been found that, instead of being eternal
and complete, the concept undergoes change, that it has simply the
stability and wholeness demanded by a particular and concrete situation;
after it has been discovered, in other words, that the stability and
wholeness, instead of attaching to the content of an idea, are simply
the functions of any content used as a purpose--after all this has been
accepted in psychology, the conception of truth and reality which arose
under an entirely different conception of the nature of thought still
survives.
This change in the conception of the character of the ideas, with no
corresponding change in the conception of reality, marks the divorce of
thought and reality and the rise of the epistemological problem. Let us
recall that in Plato the relation between the higher and ultimate
reality, as constituted by the complete and "Eternal Ideas," and the
lower reality of perception, is that of archetype and ectype.
Perceptions attempt to imitate and copy the ideas. Now, when the ideas
are found to be changing, and when further the interpenetration of
perception and conception is discovered, reality as fixed and complete
must be located elsewhere. And just as in the old system it was the
business of perception to imitate the "Eternal Ideas," so here it is
still assumed that thought is to imitate the reality wherever now it is
to be located. And as regards the matter of location, the old conception
is not abandoned. The elder Plato is mighty yet. Reality must still be a
completed system of fixed and eternal "things in themselves,"
"relations," or "noumena" of some sort which _our_ ideas, now
constituted by both perception and conceptional processes, are still to
"imitate," "copy," "reflect," "represent," or at least "symbolize" in
some fashion.
From this point on, then, thought has two functions: one, to help
experience meet and reorganize into itself the results of its own past
activity; the other, to reflect or represent in some sense the absolute
system of reality. For a very long time the latter has continued to
constitute the logical problem, the former being relegated to the realm
of psychology.
But this discovery of the reconstructive function of the idea and its
assignment to the jurisdiction of psychology did not leave logic where
it was before, nor did it lighten its task. Logic could not shut its
eyes to this "psychological" character of the idea.[165] Indeed, logic
had to take the idea as psychology described it, then do the best it
could with it for its purpose.
The embarrassment of logic by this reconstructive character of the idea
even Aristotle discovered to some extent in the relation of the Platonic
perceptions to the eternal ideas. He found great difficulty in getting a
flowing stream of consciousness to imitate or even symbolize an
eternally fixed and completed reality. And since we have discovered, in
addition, that the idea is so palpably a reconstructive activity, the
difficulties have not diminished.
In such a situation it could only be a question of time until solutions
of the problem should be sought by attempting to bring together these
two functions of the idea. Perhaps after all the representation of
objects in an absolute system is involved in the reconstruction of our
experience. Or perhaps what appears as reconstructions of our
experience--as desiring, struggling, deliberating, choosing, willing, as
sorrows and joys, failures and triumphs--are but the machinery by which
the absolute system is represented. At any rate, these two functions
surely cannot be regarded as belonging to the idea as color and form
belong to a stone. We should never be satisfied with such a brute
dualism as this.
Without any further historical sketch of attempts at this synthesis, I
desire to pass at once to a consideration of what I am sure everyone
will agree must stand as one of the most brilliant and in every way
notable efforts in this direction--Mr. Royce's Aberdeen lectures on "The
World and the Individual." It is the purpose here to examine that part
of these lectures, and it is the heart of the whole matter, in which the
key to the solution of the problem of the relation between ideas and
reality is sought precisely in the purposive character of the idea. This
will be found especially in the "Introduction" and in the chapter on
"Internal and External Meaning of Ideas."[166]