[21] This is but to say that the presentation of objects as
specifically different things in experience is the work of reflection,
and that the discrimination of something experienc_ed_ from modes of
experienc_ing_ is also the work of reflection. The latter statement
is, of course, but a particular case of the first; for an act of
experiencing is one object, among others, which may be discriminated
out of the original experience. When so discriminated, it has exactly
the same existential status as any other discriminated object; seeing
and thing seen stand on the same level of existentiality. But primary
experience is innocent of the discrimination of the _what_ experienced
and the _how_, or mode, of experiencing. We are not in it aware of the
seeing, nor yet of objects _as_ something seen. Any experience in all
of its non-reflective phases is innocent of any discrimination of
subject and object. It involves within itself what may be reflectively
discriminated into objects located outside the organism and objects
referred to the organism. [Note added in revision.]
[22] Of course, this very element may be the precarious, the ideal,
and possibly fanciful of some other situation. But it is to change the
historic into the absolute to conclude that therefore everything is
uncertain, all at once, or as such. This gives metaphysical skepticism
as distinct from the working skepticism which is an inherent factor in
all reflection and scientific inquiry.
[23] But this is a slow progress within reflection. Plato, who was
influential in bringing this general distinction to consciousness,
still thought and wrote as if "image" were itself a queer sort of
objective existence; it was only gradually that it was disposed of as
a phase of personal experiencing.
[24] I, 28-34.
[25] It is interesting to see how explicitly Lotze is compelled
finally to differentiate two aspects in the antecedents of thoughts,
one of which is necessary in order that there may be anything to call
out thought (a lack, or problem); the other in order that when thought
is evoked it may find data at hand--that is, material in shape to
receive and respond to its exercise. "The manifold matter of ideas is
brought before us, not only in the _systematic order of its
qualitative relationships_, but in the rich _variety of local and
temporal combinations_.... The _combinations of heterogeneous ideas_
... form the _problems_, in connection with which the efforts of
thought to reduce coexistence to coherence will _subsequently_ be
made. The _homogeneous or similar_ ideas, on the other hand, give
occasion to separate, to connect, and to count their repetitions" (I,
33, 34; italics mine). Without the heterogeneous variety of the local
and temporal juxtapositions there would be nothing to excite thought.
Without the systematic arrangement of quality there would be nothing
to meet thought and reward it for its efforts. The homogeneity of
qualitative relationships, _in the pre-thought material_, gives the
tools or instruments by which thought is enabled successfully to
tackle the heterogeneity of collocations and conjunctions also found
in the same material! One would suppose that when Lotze reached this
point he might have been led to suspect that in his remarkable
adjustment of thought-stimuli, thought-material, and thought-tools to
one another, he must after all be dealing, not with something prior to
the thought-function, but with the necessary structures and tools of
the thought-situation.
[26] _Supra_, p. 113.
[27] For the identity of sensory experience with the point of greatest
strain and stress in conflicting or tensional experience, see "The
Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology," _Psychological Review_, III, 57.
[28] For the "accessory" character of thought, see Lotze, I, 7, 25-27,
61, etc.
[29] Bosanquet (_Logic_, I, 30-34) and Jones (_Philosophy of Lotze_,
1895, chap. iv) have called attention to a curious inconsistency in
Lotze's treatment of judgment. On one hand, the statement is as given
above. Judgment grows out of conception in making explicit the
determining relation of universal to its own particular, implied in
conception. But, on the other hand, judgment grows not out of
conception at all, but out of the question of determining connection
in change. Lotze's nominal reason for this latter view is that the
conceptual world is purely static; since the actual world is one of
change, we need to pass upon what really goes together (is causal) in
the change as distinct from such as are merely coincident. But, as
Jones clearly shows, it is also connected with the fact that, while
Lotze nominally asserts that judgment grows out of conception, he
treats conception as the result of judgment since the first view makes
judgment a mere explication of the content of an idea, and hence
merely expository or analytic (in the Kantian sense) and so of more
than doubtful applicability to reality. The affair is too large to
discuss here, and I will content myself with referring to the
oscillation between conflicting contents and gradation of sensory
qualities already discussed (p. 144, note). It is judgment which grows
out of the former, because judgment is the whole situation as such;
conception is referable to the latter because it _is_ one abstraction
within the whole (the solution of possible meanings of the data) just
as the datum is another. In truth, since the sensory datum is not
absolute, but comes in a historical context, the qualities apprehended
as constituting the datum simply define the locus of conflict in the
entire situation. They are attributives of the contents-in-tension of
the colliding things, not calm untroubled ultimates. On pp. 33 and 34
of Vol. I, Lotze recognizes (as we have just seen) that, as matter of
fact, it is both sensory qualities in their systematic grading, or
quantitative determinations (see I, 43, for the recognition of the
necessary place of the quantitative in the true concept), and the
"rich variety of local and temporal combinations," that provoke
thought and supply it with material. But, as usual, he treats this
simply as a historical accident, not as furnishing the key to the
whole matter. In fine, while the heterogeneous collocations and
successions constitute the problematic element that stimulates
thought, quantitative determination of the sensory quality furnishes
one of the two chief means through which thought deals with the
problem. It is a reduction of the original colliding contents to a
form in which the effort at redintegration gets maximum efficiency.
The concept, as ideal meaning, is of course the other partner to the
transaction. It is getting the various possible meanings-of-the-data
into such shape as to make them most useful in construing the data.
The bearing of this upon the subject and predicate of judgment cannot
be discussed here.
[30] See I, 38, 59, 61, 105, 129, 197, for Lotze's treatment of these
distinctions.
[31] I, 36; see also II, 290, 291.
[32] II, 246; the same is reiterated in II, 250, where the question of
origin is referred to as a corruption in logic. Certain psychical acts
are necessary as "conditions and occasions" of logical operations, but
the "deep gulf between psychical mechanism and thought remains
unfilled."
V