W. E. Johnson says: “As a material machine is an instrument for
economising the exertion of force, so a symbolic calculus is an
instrument for economising the exertion of intelligence. And, employing
the same analogy, the more perfect the calculus, the smaller would be the
amount of intelligence applied as compared with the results produced.” He
continues:
“But as the exertion of _some_ force is necessary for working the
machine, so the exertion of _some_ intelligence is necessary for working
the calculus.”
Here we feel inclined to stop our author. That which makes of a certain
amount of metal, brass, and wood a machine, is the form in which they
are composed, and this form is instrumental in using a certain amount of
energy for doing a certain kind of work. Intelligence is not analogous
to force but to the form of force. Not intelligence is necessary to run
the instrument of intelligence, but some power, some force, some energy,
and this power needed for running the instrument of intelligence, as it
exists in man, is generally called will. So we are at variance with Mr.
W. S. Johnson from the outset. Mr. Johnson from his standpoint considers
it “important to examine the kind and degree of intelligence that are
demanded in the employment of any symbolic calculus. It will appear that
the _logical_ calculus stands in a unique relation to intelligence; for
it aims at exhibiting, in a non-intelligent form, those same intelligent
principles that are actually required for working it.”
We abstain here from discussing the details of this highly suggestive
article which contains much that is of interest to logicians. The author
claims especially with regard to his interpretation of the universal and
particular that his results exactly correspond with the interpretation
given by Dr. Venn and Mr. Peirce, and worked out by Dr. Keynes.
The Germans distinguish between _Urtheil_ and _Beurtheilung_, the first
being judgment in general, the latter a judgment that declares something
to possess value from the view of truth, beauty or goodness. In this
sense Mr. S. Alexander deals with the idea of value. He states two main
principles. (1) That value is “the efficiency of a conscious agent
to promote the efficiency of society” and this, the author says, was
maintained indirectly in opposition to the view that value was determined
by pleasure. (2) That value is itself no something separable from other
mental facts by a wide gulf, but was itself a fact of a purely natural
order. “Sollen” is one kind of “Sein.”
Mr. J. Ellis McTaggart in discussing the changes of method in Hegel’s
Dialectic arrives at a conclusion which according to the author must
be admitted to be quite un-Hegelian. Hegel apparently regarded the
procession of the categories with its advance through oppositions and
reconciliations as presenting absolute truth. From this the author
dissents, “for,” he says: “the true process of thought is one in which
each category springs out of the one before it, and not by contradicting
it, but as the expression of its deepest nature, while it, in its turn,
is seen to have its deepest reality in again passing on to the one
after it. There is no contradiction no opposition, and consequently no
reconciliation. There is only development, the rendering explicit what
was implicit, the growth of the seed to the plant. In the actual course
of the dialectic this is never attained. It is an ideal which is never
quite realised, and from the nature of the case never can be quite
realised. In the dialectic there is always opposition, and therefore
always reconciliation. We do not go straight onward, but more or less
from side to side. It seems inevitable, therefore, to conclude that
the dialectic does not completely and perfectly express the nature of
thought.”
Prof. C. Lloyd Morgan starting from the proposition that “the business
of consciousness is the control of action” shows that “we identify
ourselves rather with the action of our control centres than with our
lower animal instincts. Through experience we learn, and habits being
formed by individual repetition become innate.” Professor Morgan reviews
use-inheritance natural selection, sexual selection, the law of beauty,
and conduct and verification with regard to psychogenesis. “Our nature,”
he says, “is intellectual, æsthetic, moral, and sensitive”:
“The false is rejected as incongruous to our nature as intellectual;
the ugly is avoided as incongruous to our nature as æsthetic; the wrong
is shunned as incongruous to our nature as moral; so is the painful, so
far as possible, avoided as incongruous to our nature as sensitive....
The guidance of pleasure and pain is of great importance—so great that
some are found to argue that in moral matters we are influenced solely
by considerations of happiness.... Only by extending the meaning of the
words pleasure and pain so as to be coextensive with what I have here
termed congruous and incongruous can it be said that our actions and
our thoughts are determined by pleasure and pain.” (London: Williams &
Norgate.)
κρς.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. Vol. I, No. 1. January, 1892.
CONTENTS of No. 1.