The efforts of classic empiricism at the reform of logic have long been
an easy mark for idealistic reformers. But it is interesting to observe
that the idealistic logic from the beginning finds itself in precisely
the same predicament regarding hypotheses;--they are trifling or false.
And in the end they are made, as in Mill, "accidents" of inference.
The part played by Kant's sense-material and the categories is almost
the reverse of those of data and hypothesis in science. Sense material
and the categories are the given elements from which objects are somehow
made; in scientific procedure data and hypothesis are derived through
logical observation and imagination from the content and operations of
immediate experience. In Kant's account of the process by which objects
are constructed we are nowhere in sight of any experimental procedure.
Indeed, the real act of knowing, the selection and application of the
category to the sense matter, is, as Kant in the end had to confess,
"hidden away in the depths of the soul." Made in the presence of the
elaborate machinery of knowing which Kant had constructed, this
confession is almost tragic; and the tragic aspect grows when we find
that the result of the "hidden" operation is merely a phenomenal object.
That this should be the case, however, is not strange. A phenomenal
object is the inevitable correlate of the "hidden" act of knowing
whether in a "transcendental" or in an "empirical" logic. In vain do we
call the act of knowing "constructive" and "synthetic" if its method of
synthesis is hidden. A transcendental unity whose method is indefinable
has no advantage over empirical association.
It was the dream of Kant as of Mill to replace the logics of
sensationalism and rationalism with a "logic of things" and of "truth."
But as Mill's things turned to states of consciousness, so Kant's are
phenomenal. Their common fate proclaims their common failure--the
failure to reestablish continuity between the conduct of intelligence
and other conduct.
One of the chief counts in Hegel's indictment of Kant's logic is that
"it had no influence on the methods of science."[15] Hegel's explanation
is that Kant's categories have no genesis; they are not constructed in
and as part of logical operations. As given, ready-made, their relevance
is a miracle. But if categories be "generated" in the process of
knowing, says Hegel, they are indigenous, and their fitness is
inevitable. In such statements Hegel raises expectations that we are at
last to have a logic which squares with the procedure of science. But
when we discover that instead of being "generated" out of all the
material involved in the scientific problem Hegel's categories are
derived from each other, misgivings arise. And when we further learn
that this "genesis" is timeless, which means that, after all, the
categories stand related to each other in a closed, eternal system of
implication, we abandon hope of a scientific--i.e., experimental--logic.
Hegel also says it is the business of philosophy "to substitute
categories or in more precise language adequate notions for the several
modes of feeling, perception, desire, and will." The word "substitute"
reveals the point at issue. If "to substitute" means that philosophy is
a complete exchange of the modes of feeling, perception, desire, and
will for a world of categories or notions, then, saying nothing of the
range of values in such a world, the problem of the meaning of
"adequate" is on our hands. What is the notion to be adequate to? But if
"to substitute" means that the modes of feeling, perception, desire, and
will, when in a specific situation of ambiguity and inhibition, go over
into, take on, the modes of data and hypothesis in the effort to get rid
of inhibiting conflict that is quite another matter. Here the "notion,"
as the scientific hypothesis, has a criterion for its adequacy. But if
the notion usurps the place of feeling, perception, desire, and will, as
many find, in the end, it does in Hegel's logic, it thereby loses all
tests for the adequacy of its function and character as a notion.
In the development of the logical doctrines of Kant and Hegel by Lotze,
Green, Sigwart, Bradley, Bosanquet, Royce, and others, there are indeed
differences. But these differences only throw their common ground into
bolder relief. This common ground is that, procedure by hypotheses, by
induction, is, in the language of Professor Bosanquet, "a transient and
external characteristic of inference."[16] And the ground of this
verdict is essentially the same as Mill's, when he rejects hypotheses
"made by the mind," namely, that such hypotheses are too subjective in
their origin and nature to have objective validity. "Objective" idealism
is trying, like Mill, to escape the subjectivism of the purely
individual and "psychical" knower. But, being unable to reconstruct the
finite knower, and being too sophisticated to make what it regards as
Mill's naive appeal to "hypotheses found in things," it transfers the
real process of inference to the "objective universal," and the process
of all thought, including inference, is now defined as "_the
reproduction, by a universal presented in a content, of contents
distinguished from the presented content which also are differences of
the same universal_."[17]
It need scarcely be said that in inference thus defined there is scant
room for hypotheses. There is nothing "hypothetical," "experimental," or
"tentative" in this process of reproduction by the objective universal
as such. As little is there any possibility of error. If there is
anything hypothetical, or any possibility of error, in inference, it is
due to the temporal, finite human being in which, paradoxically enough,
this process of "reproduction" goes on and to whom, at times, is given
an "infinitesimal" part in the operation, while at other times he is
said merely to "witness" it. But the real inference does not "proceed by
hypotheses"; it is only the finite mind in witnessing the real logical
spectacle or in its "infinitesimal" contribution to it that lamely
proceeds in this manner.
Here, again, we have the same break in continuity between the finite,
human act of knowing and the operations that constitute the real world.
When the logic of the objective universal rejects imputations of
harboring a despoiled psychical knower it has in mind, of course, the
objective universal as knower, not the finite, human act. But, if the
participations of the latter are all accidents of inference, as they are
said to be, its advantage over a purely psychical knower, or "states of
consciousness," is difficult to see. The rejection of metaphysical
dualism is of no consequence if the logical operations of the finite,
human being are only "accidents" of the real logical process. As already
remarked, the metaphysical disjunction is merely a schematism of the
more fundamental, logical disjunction.
As for tautology and miracle, the follower of Mill might well ask: how
an association of particulars, whether mental states or things, could be
more tautologous than a universal reproducing its own differences? And
if the transition from particular to particular is a miracle in which
the grace of God is disguised as "habit," why is not habit as good a
disguise for Providence as universals? Moreover, by what miracle does
the one all-inclusive universal become _a_ universal? And since
perception always presents a number of universals, what determines which
one shall perform the reproduction? Finally, since there are infinite
differences of the universal that might be reproduced, what determines
just which differences shall be reproduced? In this wise the controversy
has gone on ever since the challenge of the old rationalistic logic by
the nominalists launched the issue of empiricism and rationalism. All
the charges which each makes against the other are easily retorted upon
itself. Each side is resistless in attack, but helpless in defense.
In a conception of inference in which both data and hypothesis are
regarded as the tentative, experimental results of the processes of
perception, memory, and constructive imagination engaged in the special
task of removing conflict, ambiguity, and inhibition, and in which these
processes are not conceived as the functions of a private mind nor of an
equally private brain and nervous system, but as functions of
interacting beings,--in such a conception there is no ground for anxiety
concerning the simplicity of data, nor the objectivity of hypotheses.
Simplicity and objectivity do not have to be secured through elaborate
and labored metaphysical construction. The data are simple and the
hypothesis objective in so far as they accomplish the work
where unto they are called--the removal of conflict, ambiguity, and
inhibition in conduct and affection.
In the experimental conception of inference it is clear that the
principles of formal logic must play their role wholly inside the course
of logical operations. They do not apply to relations _between_ these
operations and "reality"; nor to "reality" itself. Formal identity and
non-contradiction signify, in experimental logic, the complete
correlativity of data and hypothesis. They mean that _in_ the logical
procedure data must not be shifted without a corresponding change in the
hypothesis and conversely. The doctrine that "theoretically" there may
be any number of hypotheses for "the same facts" is, when these multiple
hypotheses are anything more than different names or symbols, nothing
less than the very essence of formal contradiction. It doubtless makes
little difference whether a disease be attributed to big or little,
black or red, demons or whether the cause be represented by a, b, or c,
etc. But where data and hypotheses are such as are capable of
verification, i.e., of mutually checking up each other, a change in one
without a corresponding modification of the other is the principle of
all formal fallacies.[18]
With this conception of the origin, nature, and functions of logical
operations little remains to be said of their truth and falsity. If the
whole enterprise of logical operation, of the construction and
verification of hypothesis, is in the interest of the removal of
ambiguity, and inhibition in conduct, the only relevant truth or falsity
they can possess must be determined by their success or failure in that
undertaking. The acceptance of this view of truth and error, be it said
again, depends on holding steadfastly to the conception of the
operations of knowing as _real acts_, which, though having a distinct
character and function, are yet in closest continuity with other acts of
which indeed they are but modifications and adaptations in order to meet
the logical demand.
Here, perhaps, is the place for a word on truth and satisfaction. The
satisfaction which marks the truth of logical operations--"intellectual
satisfaction"--is the satisfaction which attends the accomplishment of
their task, viz., the removal of ambiguity in conduct, i.e., in our
interaction with other beings. It does not mean that this satisfaction
is bound to be followed by wholly blissful consequences. All our
troubles are not over when the distress of ambiguity is removed. It may
be indeed that the verdict of the logical operation is that we must face
certain death. Very well, we must have felt it to be "good to know the
worst," or no inquiry would have been started. We should have deemed
ignorance bliss and sat with closed eyes waiting for fate to overtake us
instead of going forward to meet it and in some measure determine it.
Death anticipated and accepted is _realiter_ very different from death
that falls upon us unawares, however we may estimate that difference. If
this distinction in the _foci_ of satisfaction is kept clear it must do
away with a large amount of the hedonistic interpretations of
satisfaction in which many critics have indulged.
But hereupon some one may exclaim, as did a colleague recently: "Welcome
to the ranks of the intellectualists!" If so, the experimentalist is
bound to reply that he is as willing, and as unwilling, to be welcomed
to the ranks of intellectualism as to those of anti-intellectualism. He
wonders, however, how long the welcome would last in either. Among the
intellectualists the welcome would begin to cool as soon as it should be
discovered that the ambiguity to which logical operations are the
response is not regarded by the experimentalist as a purely intellectual
affair. It is an ambiguity in conduct with all the attendant affectional
values that may be at stake.[19] It is, to be sure, the fact of
ambiguity, and the effort to resolve it, that adds the intellectual,
logical character to conduct and to affectional values. But if the
logical interest attempts entirely to detach itself it will soon be
without either subject-matter or criterion. And if it sets itself up as
supreme, we shall be forced to say that our quandaries of affection, our
problems of life and death are merely to furnish occasions and material
for logical operations.
On the other hand, the welcome of the anti-intellectualists is equally
sure to wane when the experimentalist asserts that the doctrine that
logical operations mutilate the wholeness of immediate experience
overlooks the palpable fact that it is precisely these immediate
experiences--the experiences of intuition and instinct--that get into
conflict and inhibit and mutilate one another, and as a consequence are
obliged to go into logical session to patch up the mutilation and
provide new and better methods of cooeperation.
At this point the weakness in Bergson's view of logical operations
appears. Bergson, too, is impressed by the break in continuity between
logical operations and the rest of experience. But with Mr. Bradley he
believes this breach to be essentially incurable, because the
mutilations and disjunctions are due to and introduced by logical
operations. Just why the latter are introduced remains in the end a
mystery. Both, to be sure, believe that logical operations are valuable
for "practical" purposes,--for action. But, aside from the question of
_how_ operations essentially mutilative can be valuable for action,
immediate intuitional experience being already in unity with Reality,
why should there be any practical need for logical operations--least of
all such as introduce disjunction and mutilation?
The admission of a demand for logical operations, whether charged to
matter, the devil, or any other metaphysical adversary, is, of course, a
confession that conflict and ambiguity are as fundamental in experience
as unity and immediacy and that logical operations are therefore no less
indigenous. The failure to see this implication is responsible for the
paradox that in the logic of Creative Evolution the operations of
intelligence are neither creative nor evolutional. They not only have no
constructive part but are positively destructive and devolutional.
Since, moreover, these logical operations, like those of the objective
universal, and like Mill's association of particulars, can only
reproduce in fragmentary form what has already been done, it is
difficult to see how they can meet the demands of action. For here no
more than in Mill, or in the logic of idealism, is there any place for
constructive hypotheses or any technique by which they can become
effective. Whatever "Creative Evolution" may be, there is no place in
its logic for "Creative Intelligence."