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 with 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 position of reflection amid the typical functions
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 evident confusion of existing logical theory, its uncertainty as
to its own bounds and limits, its tendency to oscillate from larger
questions of the meaning of judgment and the validity of inference
over to details of scientific technique, and to translate distinctions
of formal logic into acts in 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 in experience so far as such _locus_ enables
us to 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 control of experience. I shall attempt to show that
we must consider subject-matter from the standpoint, first, of the
_antecedents_ or conditions that evoke thought; secondly, of the
_datum_ or _immediate material_ presented to thought; and, thirdly, of
the _proper objective_ 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; material which is
organized by inquiry so far as inquiry has fulfilled its purpose. 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 and control of
things in experience, and being thereby compelled to interpret certain
notions as absolute instead of as historic 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 retesting and criticizing of the intellectual
standpoints and methods which we bring with us to the study.
Nowadays everyone comes with certain distinctions already made between
the subjective and the objective, between the physical and the mental,
between the intellectual and the factual. (1) We have learned to
regard the region of emotional disturbance, of uncertainty and
aspiration, as belonging peculiarly to ourselves; we have learned to
set over against this the 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 with that of sense perception; more generally
we contrast the given with the inferential. (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 conceptions, our mental habits are so set
that they tend to have their own way with us; 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. Our conclusions are thus
controlled by the very notions which need criticism and revision.
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 stuff upon which thought may
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 this discussion is successful; if Lotze can provide the
intermediaries which span the gulf between the exercise of logical
functions by thought upon a material wholly external to it; if he can
show that the question of the origin of subject-matter of thought and
of thought-activity is irrelevant to the question of its meaning and
validity, we shall have to surrender the position already taken. But
if we find that Lotze's elaborations only elaborate the fundamental
difficulty, presenting it now in this light and now in that, but
always 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 a matter of fact, falls back upon some
organized situation or function as the source of both the material and
the process of inquiry, we shall have in so far an elucidation and
even a corroboration of our theory.
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 its cue. Lotze differs from many
logicians of the same type in furnishing an explicit account of these
antecedents.
1. 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."[13]
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. This distinction marks off thought as activity from
any psychical event and from the associative mechanism as mere
happenings. One is concerned with mere _de facto_ coexistences and
sequences; the other with the cognitive _worth_ of these
combinations.[14]
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."[15]
And again: "Thought can make no difference where it finds none already
in the matter of the impressions."[16] And again: "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."[17]
The impressions and ideas thus 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
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 cause 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 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,"[18] the attribution
of objective content, of reference and meaning to ideas, is
unambiguous. The idea forms a most convenient halfway house for Lotze.
On one hand, as absolutely prior to thought, as material antecedent
condition, it is merely psychical, bald subjective event. But as
subject-matter for thought, as antecedent which affords stuff for
thought's exercise, it characteristically qualifies 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."[19]
It is only by continual transition from impression and ideas as mental
states and events to ideas as 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 objects as
antecedents would demand reconsideration of the whole viewpoint, 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 meaning_ through an intermediary process. 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 which constitutes the need that provokes the response of
thought. Here Lotze vibrates (_a_) between considering both
coincidence and coherence as psychical events; (_b_) considering
coincidence as purely psychical and coherence as at least
quasi-logical, and (_c_) making them both determinations within the
sphere of reflective thought. In strict accordance with his own
premises, coincidence and coherence ought both 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
frequency 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 connection, 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. But in truth,
sun-revolving-about-earth is a single meaning or intellectual object;
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 a
rule, specification, or direction of how to think when we have
occasion to think a certain subject-matter. To treat this mutual
reference as if it were simply a case of conjunction of mental events
produced by psycho-physical irritation and association is a profound
case of the psychological fallacy. We may, indeed, analyze an
experience involving belief in an object of a certain kind 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 by those who held 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 experienced frame
of things--of the real world.
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 (I, 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 a bare fact
of existence and a 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 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 contrast their present state as bare
conjunction over against another scheme as one which is coherent. 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 presents 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 objective experience
is subjected to critical analysis for purposes of definitive
restatement. The tendency to regard some combination as 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 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 offhand 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 logical or reflective
function.
3. This brings us explicitly to the fact that there is neither
coincidence nor 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 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 Kantian 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 (I, 24). But he has not
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 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 except to recognize that an entire
situation or environment, within which exist both that which is
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. The stimulus is a situation which
is organized or constituted as a whole, and yet which 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 goes together.
And real coherence means precisely capacity to exist within the
comprehending whole. To read back into the preliminary situation
those distinctions of mere conjunction of material and of valid
coherence which get existence, to say nothing of fixation, only within
the process of inquiry is a fallacy.
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 of
thought, giving the cue to its specific activities and determining its
object. On the contrary, it is this latter point upon which we would
insist; so as (by insisting) to 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, to show 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 reflection which in reality comes forth only from the whole
disturbed situation. On the negative side, characterizations of
impression and idea are distinctions which arise only within
reflection upon that situation which is the genuine antecedent of
thought. Positively, it is the whole dynamic experience with its
qualitative and pervasive continuity, and its inner active
distraction, its elements at odds with each other, in tension against
each other, each contending for its proper placing and relationship,
which 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 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. The experience exists as one of vital
and active confusion and conflict among its elements. 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 a transition into the thought-situation--this, in turn,
being only a constant movement toward a defined equilibrium. The
conflict has objective worth because it is the antecedent condition
and cue of thought. Deny an organization of things within which
competing incompatible tendencies appear and thinking becomes merely
"mental."
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 to
thinking 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 a
specific experience.
There is always as antecedent to thought an experience of
subject-matter of the physical or social world, or the previously
organized intellectual world, whose parts are actively at war with
each other--so much so that they threaten to disrupt the situation,
which accordingly for its own maintenance requires deliberate
redefinition and re-relation of its tensional parts. This redefining
and re-relating is the constructive process termed thinking: the
reconstructive situation, with its parts in tension and in such
movement toward each other as tends to a unified arrangement of
things, 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 offhand. 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_ dialectical
contradictions. It is an idle task to expose contradictions unless we
realize them in relation to the fundamental assumption which breeds
them. Lotze is bound to differentiate thought from its antecedents. He
is intent upon doing 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
temporal 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 have
connection, organization, value or force, practical and aesthetic
meaning, on their own account. The same is true of deeds, affections,
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 regarded than its total
incapacity to officiate as material condition and cue of thought
appears. It is about as relevant to thinking as are changes that may
be happening on the other side of the moon. So, one by one, the whole
series of determinations of force and worth already traced are
introduced _into_ the very make-up, the inner structure, of what was
to be _mere_ existence: viz., (1) things of whose spatial and temporal
relations the mere impressions are somehow _representative_; (2)
_meaning_--the idea as significant, possessed of quality, and not a
mere event; (3) distinguished traits of coincidence and coherence
within the stream. All these features are explicitly asserted, as we
have seen; underlying and running through them all is the recognition
of the supreme value of a situation which has been organized as a
whole, yet is now conflicting in its inner constitution.
These contradictions all arise in the attempt to put thought's work,
as concerned with objective validity, over against experience as a
mere antecedent happening, or occurrence. This contrast arises because
of the attempt to consider thought as an independent somewhat in
general which nevertheless, in _our_ experience, is dependent upon a
raw material of mere impressions given to it. Hence the sole radical
avoidance of the contradictions can be secured only when thinking is
seen to be a specific event in the movement of experienced things,
having its own specific occasion or demand, and its own specific
place.
The nature of the organization and force 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_"
(I, 4). It gives rise to "useful combinations," "correct
expectations," "seasonable reactions" (I, 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 real state of
things. The unreflective world is a world of practical things; of ends
and means, of their effective adaptations; of control and regulation
of conduct in view of results. The world of uncritical experience also
is a world of social aims and means, involving at every turn the goods
and objects of affection and attachment, of competition and
co-operation. It has incorporate also in its own being the surprise of
aesthetic 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-aesthetic environment. I only mean to
indicate that thought does take place _in_ such a world; not _after_
a world of bare existences; and that while the more systematic
reflection we call organized science may, in some fair sense, be said
to come _after_, it comes after affectional, artistic, and
technological interests which have found realization.
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.[20] This is the
position frequently called neo-Hegelian (though, I think, with
questionable accuracy), and has been developed by many writers in
criticizing 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 organization and force, 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-aesthetic objects 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 form of experience.
More specifically, when the difference is minimized between the
organized and arranged scheme 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
which presents itself when the distinction is exaggerated into one
between bare 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 idealists 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: 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 idealist 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 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 than thought, and
induce reflective thought not as bare impressions, etc., but through
their place in some whole, then we have admitted the possibility of
organization 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 are prohibited from attempting any such
transfer. To identify logical processes, states, devices, results
which are conditioned upon the primary fact of resistance to thought
as constitutive with the structure of constitutive 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!
This is not a merely controversial criticism. It points positively
toward the fundamental thesis of these chapters: All the distinctions
discovered within thinking, of conception as over against sense
perception, of various modes and forms of judgment, 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 into absolute and fixed distinctions of
existence and meaning, and of one kind of meaning and another kind,
things which are historic or temporal 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
employ--instead of as reconstructive. The rock against which every
such logic splits is that either existence 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.