In the foregoing discussion, particularly in the last chapter, we were
repeatedly led to recognize that thought has its own distinctive
objects. At times Lotze gives way to the tendency to define thought
entirely in terms of modes and forms of activity which are exercised
by it upon a strictly foreign material. But two motives continually
push him in the other direction. (1) Thought has a distinctive work to
do, one which involves a qualitative transformation of (at least) the
_relationships_ of the presented matter; as fast as it accomplishes
this work, the subject-matter becomes somehow thought's
subject-matter. As we have just seen, the data are progressively
organized to meet thought's ideal of a complete whole, with its
members interconnected according to a determining principle. Such
progressive organization throws backward doubt upon the assumption of
the original total irrelevancy of the data and thought-forms to each
other. (2) A like motive operates from the side of the subject-matter.
As merely foreign and external, it is too heterogeneous to lend itself
to thought's exercise and influence. The idea, as we saw in the first
chapter, is the convenient medium through which Lotze passes from the
purely heterogeneous psychical impression or event, which is totally
irrelevant to thought's purpose and working, over to a state of
affairs which can reward thought. Idea as meaning forms the bridge
over from the brute factuality of the psychical impression to the
coherent value of thought's own content.
We have, in this chapter, to consider the question of the idea or
content of thought from two points of view: first the _possibility_ of
such a content--its consistency with Lotze's fundamental premises;
secondly, its _objective_ character--its validity and test.
I. The question of the possibility of a specific content of thought is
the question of the nature of the idea as meaning. _Meaning_ is the
characteristic object of thought. We have thus far left unquestioned
Lotze's continual assumption of meaning as a sort of thought-unit; the
building-stone of thought's construction. In his treatment of meaning,
Lotze's contradictions regarding the antecedents, data, and content of
thought reach their full conclusion. He expressly makes meaning to be
the product of thought's activity and also the unreflective material
out of which thought's operations grow.
This contradiction has been worked out in accurate and complete detail
by Professor Jones.[33] He summarizes it as follows (p. 99): "No other
way was left to him [Lotze] excepting this of first attributing all
to sense and afterwards attributing all to thought, and, finally, of
attributing it to thought only because it was already in its material.
This _seesaw_ is essential to his theory; the elements of knowledge as
he describes them can subsist only by the alternate robbery of each
other." We have already seen how strenuously Lotze insists upon the
fact that the given subject-matter of thought is to be regarded wholly
as the work of a physical mechanism, "without any action of
thought."[34] But Lotze also states that if the products of the
psychical mechanism "are to admit of combination in the definite form
of a _thought_, they each require some previous shaping to make them
into logical building-stones and to convert them from _impressions_
into _ideas_. Nothing is really more familiar to us than this first
operation of thought; the only reason why we usually overlook it is
that in the language which we inherit, it is already carried out, and
it seems, therefore, to belong to the self-evident presuppositions of
thought, _not to its own specific work_."[35] And again (I, 23),
judgments "can consist of nothing but combinations of ideas which are
no longer mere impressions: every such idea must have undergone at
least the simple formation mentioned above." Such ideas are, Lotze
goes on to urge, already rudimentary concepts--that is to say, logical
determinations.
The obviousness of the logical contradiction of attributing to a
preliminary specific work of thought exactly the condition of affairs
which is elsewhere explicitly attributed to a psychical mechanism
prior to any thought-activity, should not blind us to its import and
relative necessity. The impression, it will be recalled, is a mere
state of our own consciousness--a mood of ourselves. As such it has
simply _de facto_ relations as an event to other similar events. But
reflective thought is concerned with the relationship of a content or
matter to other contents. Hence the impression must have a matter
before it can come at all within the sphere of thought's exercise. How
shall it secure this? Why, by a preliminary activity of thought which
objectifies the impression. Blue as a mere sensuous irritation or
feeling is given a quality, the meaning "blue"--blueness; the sense
impression is objectified; it is presented "no longer as a condition
which we undergo, but as a something which has its being and its
meaning in itself, and which continues to be what it is, and to mean
what it means whether we are conscious of it or not. It is easy to see
here the _necessary beginning of that activity which we above
appropriated to thought as such_: it has not yet got so far as
converting coexistence into coherence. It has first to perform the
previous task of investing each single impression with an independent
validity, without which the later opposition of their real coherence
to mere coexistence could not be made in any intelligible sense."[36]
This objectification, which converts a sensitive state into a sensible
matter to which the sensitive state is referred, also gives this
matter "position," a certain typical character. It is not objectified
in a merely general way, but is given a specific sort of objectivity.
Of these sorts of objectivity there are three mentioned: that of a
substantive content; that of an attached dependent content; that of an
active relationship connecting the various contents with each other.
In short, we have the types of meaning embodied in language in the
form of nouns, adjectives, and verbs. It is through this preliminary
formative activity of thought that reflective or _logical_ thought has
presented to it a world of meanings ranged in an order of relative
independence and dependence, and arranged as elements in a complex of
meanings whose various constituent parts mutually influence one
another's meanings.[37]
As usual, Lotze mediates the contradiction between material
constituted _by_ thought and the same material just presented _to_
thought, by a further position so disparate to each that, taken in
connection with each by turns, it seems to bridge the gulf. After
describing the prior constitutive work of thought as above, he goes on
to discuss a _second_ phase of thought which is intermediary between
this and the third phase, viz., reflective thought proper. This second
activity is that of arranging experienced quales in series and
groups, thus ascribing a sort of universal or common somewhat to
various instances (as already described; see p. 144). On one hand, it
is clearly stated that this second phase of thought's activity is in
reality the _same_ as the first phase: since all objectification
involves positing, since positing involves distinction of one matter
from others, and since this involves placing it in a series or group
in which each is measurably marked off, as to the degree and nature of
its diversity, from every other. We are told that we are only
considering "a really inseparable operation" of thought from two
different sides: first, as to the effect which objectifying thought
has upon the matter as set over against the feeling _subject_;
secondly, the effect which this objectification has upon the matter in
relation to _other matters_.[38] Afterward, however, these two
operations are declared to be radically different in type and nature.
The first is determinant and formative; it gives ideas "the shape
without which the logical spirit could not accept them." In a way it
dictates "its own laws to its object-matter."[39] The second activity
of thought is rather passive and receptive. It simply recognizes what
is already there. "Thought can make no difference where it finds none
already in the matter of impressions."[40] "The first universal, as we
saw, can only be experienced in immediate sensation. It is no product
of thought, but something that thought finds already in
existence."[41]
The obviousness of this further contradiction is paralleled only by
its inevitableness. Thought is in the air, is arbitrary and wild in
dealing with meanings, unless it gets its start and cue from actual
experience. Hence the necessity of insisting upon thought's activity
as just recognizing the contents already given. But, on the other
hand, prior to the work of thought there is to Lotze no content or
meaning. It requires a work of thought to detach anything from the
flux of sense irritations and invest it with a meaning of its own.
This dilemma is inevitable to any writer who declines to consider as
correlative the nature of thought-activity and thought-content from
the standpoint of their generating conditions in the movement of
experience. Viewed from such a standpoint the principle of solution is
clear enough. As we have already seen (p. 121), the internal
dissension of an experience leads to detaching certain factors
previously integrated in the concrete experience as aspects of its own
qualitative coloring, and to relegating them, for the time being
(pending integration into further immediate qualities of a
reconstituted experience), into a world of bare meanings, a sphere
qualified as ideal throughout. These meanings then become the tools of
thought in interpreting the data, just as the sense qualities which
define the presented situation are the immediate matter for thought.
The two _as mutually referred_ are content. That is, the datum and the
meaning as reciprocally qualified by each other constitute the
objective of thought.
To reach this unification is thought's objective or goal. Every
successive cross-section of reflective inquiry presents what may be
taken for granted as the outcome of previous thinking, and as the
determinant of further reflective procedure. Taken as defining the
point reached in the thought-function and serving as constituent unit
in further thought, it is content or logical object. Lotze's instinct
is sure in identifying and setting over against each other the
material given to thought and the content which is thought's own
"building-stone." His contradictions arise simply from the fact that
his absolute, non-historic method does not permit him to interpret
this joint identity and distinction in a working, and hence relative,
sense.
II. The question of how the existence of meanings, or
thought-contents, is to be understood merges imperceptibly into the
question of the real objectivity or validity of such contents. The
difficulty for Lotze is the now familiar one: So far as his logic
compels him to insist that these meanings are the possession and
product of thought (since thought is an independent activity), the
ideas are merely ideas; there is no test of objectivity beyond the
thoroughly unsatisfactory and formal one of their own mutual
consistency. In reaction from this Lotze is thrown back upon the idea
of these contents as the original matter given in the impressions
themselves. Here there seems to be an objective or external test by
which the reality of thought's operations may be tried; a given idea
is verified or found false according to its measure of correspondence
with the matter of experience as such. But now we are no better off.
The original independence and heterogeneity of impressions and of
thought is so great that there is no way to compare the results of the
latter with the former. We cannot compare or contrast distinctions of
worth with bare differences of factual existence (I, 2). The standard
or test of objectivity is so thoroughly external that by original
definition it is wholly outside the realm of thought. How can thought
compare meanings with existences?
Or again, the given material of experience apart from thought is
precisely the relatively chaotic and unorganized; it even reduces
itself to a mere sequence of psychical events. What sense is there in
directing us to compare the highest results of scientific inquiry with
the bare sequence of our own states of feeling; or even with the
original data whose fragmentary and uncertain character was the exact
motive for entering upon scientific inquiry? How can the former in any
sense give a check or test of the value of the latter? This is
professedly to test the validity of a system of meanings by comparison
with that whose defects call forth the construction of the system of
meanings.
Our subsequent inquiry simply consists in tracing some of the phases
of the characteristic seesaw from one to the other of the two horns of
the now familiar dilemma: either thought is separate from the matter
of experience, and then its validity is wholly its own private
business, or else the objective results of thought are already in the
antecedent material, and then thought is either unnecessary or else
has no way of checking its own performances.
1. Lotze assumes, as we have seen, a certain independent validity in
each meaning or qualified content, taken in and of itself. "Blue" has
a certain meaning, in and of itself; it is an _object_ for
consciousness as such, not merely its state or mood. After the
original sense irritation through which it was mediated has entirely
disappeared, it persists as a valid meaning. Moreover, it is an object
or content of thought for others as well. Thus it has a double mark
of validity: in the comparison of one part of my own experience with
another, and in the comparison of my experience as a whole with that
of others. Here we have a sort of validity which does not raise at all
the question of _metaphysical_ reality (I, 14, 15). Lotze thus seems
to have escaped from the necessity of employing as check or test for
the validity of ideas any reference to a real outside the sphere of
thought itself. Such terms as "conjunction," "franchise,"
"constitution," "algebraic zero," etc., claim to possess objective
validity. Yet none of these professes to refer to a reality beyond
thought. Generalizing this point of view, validity or objectivity of
meaning means simply that which is "identical for all consciousness"
(I, 3); "it is quite indifferent whether certain parts of the world of
thought indicate something which has beside an independent reality
outside of thinking minds, or whether all that it contains exists only
in the thoughts of those who think it, but with equal validity for
them all" (I, 16).
So far it seems clear sailing. Difficulties, however, show themselves
the moment we inquire what is meant by a self-identical content for
all thought. Is this to be taken in a static or in a dynamic way? That
is to say: Does it express the fact that a given content or meaning is
_de facto_ presented to the consciousness of all alike? Does this
coequal presence guarantee an objectivity? Or does validity attach to
a given meaning or content in the sense that it directs and controls
the further exercise of thinking, and thus the formation of further
_new_ objects of knowledge?
The former interpretation is alone consistent with Lotze's notion that
the independent idea as such is invested with a certain validity or
objectivity. It alone is consistent with his assertion that concepts
precede judgments. It alone, that is to say, is consistent with the
notion that reflective thinking has a sphere of ideas or meanings
supplied to it at the outset. But it is impossible to entertain this
belief. The stimulus which, according to Lotze, goads thought on from
ideas or concepts to judgments and inferences is in truth simply the
lack of validity, of objectivity in its original independent meanings
or contents. A meaning as independent is precisely that which is not
invested with validity, but which is a mere idea, a "notion," a fancy,
at best a surmise which may turn out to be valid (and of course this
indicates possible reference); a standpoint to have its value
determined by its further active use. "Blue" as a mere detached
floating meaning, an idea at large, would not gain in validity simply
by being entertained continuously in a given consciousness, or by
being made at one and the same time the persistent object of attentive
regard by all human consciousnesses. If this were all that were
required, the chimera, the centaur, or any other subjective
construction could easily gain validity. "Christian Science" has made
just this notion the basis of its philosophy.
The simple fact is that in such illustrations as "blue," "franchise,"
"conjunction," Lotze instinctively takes cases which are not mere
independent and detached meanings, but which involve reference to a
_region_ of experience, to a region of mutually determining social
activities. The conception that reference to a _social_ activity does
not involve the same sort of reference of a meaning beyond itself that
is found in physical matters, and hence may be taken quite innocent
and free of the problem of reference to existence beyond meaning, is
one of the strangest that has ever found lodgment in human thinking.
Either both physical and social reference or neither is logical; if
neither, then it is because the meaning functions, as it originates,
in a specific situation which carries with it its own tests (see p.
96). Lotze's conception is made possible only by unconsciously
substituting the idea of an object as a content of thought for a large
number of persons (or a _de facto_ somewhat for every consciousness),
for the genuine definition of object as a _determinant_ in a scheme of
activity. The former is consistent with Lotze's conception of thought,
but wholly indeterminate as to validity or intent. The latter is the
test used experimentally in all concrete thinking, but involves a
radical transformation of all Lotze's assumptions. A given idea of
the conjunction of the franchise, or of blue, is valid, not because
everybody happens to entertain it, but because it expresses the factor
of control or direction in a given movement of experience. The test of
validity of idea[42] is its functional or instrumental use in
effecting the transition from a relatively conflicting experience to a
relatively integrated one. If Lotze's view were correct, "blue" valid
once would be valid always--even when red or green were actually
called for to fulfil specific conditions. This is to say validity
really refers to rightfulness or adequacy of performance in an
asserting of connection--not to a meaning as contemplated in
detachment.
If we refer again to the fact that the genuine antecedent of thought
is a situation which is disorganized in its structural elements, we
can easily understand how certain contents may be detached and _held_
apart as meanings or references, actual or possible. We can understand
how such detached contents may be of use in effecting a review of the
entire experience, and as affording standpoints and methods of a
reconstruction which will maintain the integrity of behavior. We can
understand how validity of meaning is measured by reference to
something which is not mere meaning; by reference to something which
lies beyond it as such--viz., the reconstitution of an experience
into which it enters as method of control. That paradox of ordinary
experience and of scientific inquiry by which objectivity is given
alike to matter of perception and to conceived relations--to facts and
to laws--affords no peculiar difficulty because the test of
objectivity is everywhere the same: anything is objective in so far
as, through the medium of conflict, it controls the movement of
experience in its reconstructive transition. There is not first an
object, whether of sense perception or of conception, which afterward
somehow exercises this controlling influence; but the objective is
_any_ existence exercising the function of control. It may only
control the act of inquiry; it may only set on foot doubt, but this is
direction of subsequent experience, and, in so far, is a token of
objectivity. It has to be reckoned with.
So much for the thought-content or meaning as having a validity of its
own. It does not have it as isolated or given or static; it has it in
its dynamic reference, its use in determining further movement of
experience. In other words, the "meaning," having been selected and
made up with reference to performing a certain office in the evolution
of a unified experience, can be tested in no other way than by
discovering whether it does what it was intended to do and what it
purports to do.[43]
2. Lotze has to wrestle with this question of validity in a further
respect: What constitutes the objectivity of thinking as a total
attitude, activity, or function? According to his own statement, the
meanings or valid ideas are after all only building-stones for logical
thought. Validity is thus not a property of them in their independent
existences, but of their mutual reference to each other. Thinking is
the process of instituting these mutual references; of building up the
various scattered and independent building-stones into the coherent
system of thought. What is the validity of the various forms of
thinking which find expression in the various types of judgment and in
the various forms of inference? Categorical, hypothetical, disjunctive
judgment; inference by induction, by analogy, by mathematical
equation; classification, theory of explanation--all these are
processes of reflection by which connection in an organized whole is
given to the fragmentary meanings with which thought sets out. What
shall we say of the validity of such processes?
On one point Lotze is quite clear. These various logical acts do not
really enter into the constitution of the valid world. The logical
forms as such are maintained _only_ in the process of thinking. The
world of valid truth does not undergo a series of contortions and
evolutions, paralleling in any way the successive steps and missteps,
the succession of tentative trials, withdrawals, and retracings, which
mark the course of our own thinking.[44]
Lotze is explicit upon the point that only the thought-content in
which the process of thinking issues has objective validity; the act
of thinking is "purely and simply an inner movement of our own minds,
made necessary to us by reason of the constitution of our nature and
of our place in the world" (II, 279).
Here the problem of validity presents itself as the problem of the
relation of the act of thinking to its own product. In his solution
Lotze uses two metaphors: one derived from building operations, the
other from traveling. The construction of a building requires of
necessity certain tools and extraneous constructions, stagings,
scaffoldings, etc., which are necessary to effect the final
construction, but which do not enter into the building as such. The
activity has an instrumental, though not a constitutive, value as
regards its product. Similarly, in order to get a view from the top of
a mountain--this view being the objective--the traveler has to go
through preliminary movements along devious courses. These again are
antecedent prerequisites, but do not constitute a portion of the
attained view.
The problem of thought as activity, as distinct from thought as
content, opens up altogether too large a question to receive complete
consideration at this point. Fortunately, however, the previous
discussion enables us to narrow the point which is in issue just here.
The question is whether the activity of thought is to be regarded as
an independent function supervening entirely from without upon
antecedents, and directed from without upon data, or whether it marks
the phase of the transformation which the course of experience
(whether practical, or artistic, or socially affectional or whatever)
undergoes for the sake of its deliberate control. If it be the latter,
a thoroughly intelligent sense can be given to the proposition that
the activity of thinking is instrumental, and that its worth is found,
not in its own successive states as such, but in the result in which
it comes to conclusion. But the conception of thinking as an
independent activity somehow occurring after an independent
antecedent, playing upon an independent subject-matter, and finally
effecting an independent result, presents us with just one miracle
the more.
I do not question the strictly instrumental character of thinking.
The problem lies not here, but in the interpretation of the nature
of the instrument. The difficulty with Lotze's position is that it
forces us into the assumption of a means and an end which are simply
and only external to each other, and yet necessarily dependent upon
each other--a position which, whenever found, is thoroughly
self-contradictory. Lotze vibrates between the notion of thought as a
tool in the external sense, a mere scaffolding to a finished building
in which it has no part nor lot, and the notion of thought as an
immanent tool, as a scaffolding which is an integral part of the very
operation of building, and which is set up for the sake of the
building-activity which is carried on effectively only with and through
a scaffolding. Only in the former case can the scaffolding be
considered as a _mere_ tool. In the latter case the external
scaffolding is _not_ the instrumentality; the actual tool is the
_action_ of erecting the building, and this action involves the
scaffolding as a constituent part of itself. The work of building is
not set over against the completed building as mere means to an end; it
_is_ the end taken in process or historically, longitudinally,
temporally viewed. The scaffolding, moreover, is not an external means
to the process of erecting, but an organic member of it. It is no mere
accident of language that "building" has a double sense--meaning at
once the process and the finished product. The outcome of thought is
the thinking activity carried on to its own completion; the activity,
on the other hand, _is_ the outcome taken anywhere short of its own
realization, and thereby still going on.
The only consideration which prevents easy and immediate acceptance of
this view is the notion of thinking as something purely formal. It is
strange that the empiricist does not see that his insistence upon a
matter accidentally given to thought only strengthens the hands of the
rationalist with his claim of thinking as an independent activity,
separate from the actual make-up of the affairs of experience.
Thinking as a merely formal activity exercised upon certain sensations
or images or objects sets forth an absolutely meaningless proposition.
The psychological identification of thinking with the process of
association is much nearer the truth. It is, indeed, on the way to the
truth. We need only to recognize that association is of matters or
meanings, not of ideas as existences or events; and that the type of
association we call thinking differs from casual fancy and revery by
control in reference to an end, to apprehend how completely thinking
is a reconstructive movement of actual contents of experience in
relation to each other.
There is no miracle in the fact that tool and material are adapted to
each other in the process of reaching a valid conclusion. Were they
external in origin to each other and to the result, the whole affair
would, indeed, present an insoluble problem--so insoluble that, if
this were the true condition of affairs, we never should even know
that there was a problem. But, in truth, both material and tool have
been secured and determined with reference to economy and efficiency
in effecting the end desired--the maintenance of a harmonious
experience. The builder has discovered that his building means
building tools, and also building material. Each has been slowly
evolved with reference to its fit employ in the entire function; and
this evolution has been checked at every point by reference to its own
correspondent. The carpenter has not thought at large on his building
and then constructed tools at large, but has thought of his building
in terms of the material which enters into it, and through that medium
has come to the consideration of the tools which are helpful.
This is not a formal question, but one of the place and relations of
the matters actually entering into experience. And they in turn
determine the taking up of just those mental attitudes, and the
employing of just those intellectual operations which most effectively
handle and organize the material. Thinking is adaptation _to_ an end
_through_ the adjustment of particular objective contents.
The thinker, like the carpenter, is at once stimulated and checked in
every stage of his procedure by the particular situation which
confronts him. A person is at the stage of wanting a new house: well,
then, his materials are available resources, the price of labor, the
cost of building, the state and needs of his family, profession, etc.;
his tools are paper and pencil and compass, or possibly the bank as a
credit instrumentality, etc. Again, the work is beginning. The
foundations are laid. This in turn determines its own specific
materials and tools. Again, the building is almost ready for
occupancy. The concrete process is that of taking away the
scaffolding, clearing up the grounds, furnishing and decorating rooms,
etc. This specific operation again determines its own fit or relevant
materials and tools. It defines the time and mode and manner of
beginning and ceasing to use them. Logical theory will get along as
well as does the practice of knowing when it sticks close by and
observes the directions and checks inherent in each successive phase
of the evolution of the cycle of experience. The problem in general of
validity of the thinking process as distinct from the validity of this
or that process arises only when thinking is isolated from its
historic position and its material context (see _ante_, p. 95).
3. But Lotze is not yet done with the problem of validity, even from
his own standpoint. The ground shifts again under his feet. It is no
longer a question of the validity of the idea or meaning with which
thought is supposed to set out; it is no longer a question of the
validity of the process of thinking in reference to its own product;
it is the question of the validity of the product. Supposing, after
all, that the final meaning, or logical idea, is thoroughly coherent
and organized; supposing it is an object for all consciousness as
such. Once more arises the question: What is the validity of even the
most coherent and complete idea?--a question which arises and will not
down. We may reconstruct the notion of the chimera until it ceases to
be an independent idea and becomes a part of the system of Greek
mythology. Has it gained in validity in ceasing to be an independent
myth, in becoming an element in systematized myth? Myth it was and
myth it remains. Mythology does not get validity by growing bigger.
How do we know the same is not the case with the ideas which are the
product of our most deliberate and extended scientific inquiry? The
reference again to the content as the self-identical object of all
consciousness proves nothing; the subject-matter of a hallucination
does not gain validity in proportion to its social contagiousness.
According to Lotze, the final product is, after all, still thought.
Now, Lotze is committed once for all to the notion that thought, in
any form, is directed by and at an outside reality. The ghost haunts
him to the last. How, after all, does even the ideally perfect valid
thought apply or refer to reality? Its genuine subject is still beyond
itself. At the last Lotze can dispose of this question only by
regarding it as a metaphysical, not a logical, problem (II, 281, 282).
In other words, _logically_ speaking, we are at the end just exactly
where we were at the beginning--in the sphere of ideas, and of ideas
only, plus a consciousness of the necessity of referring these ideas
to a reality which is beyond them, which is utterly inaccessible to
them, which is out of reach of any influence which they may exercise,
and which transcends any possible comparison with their results. "It
is vain," says Lotze, "to shrink from acknowledging the circle here
involved ... all we know of the external world depends upon the ideas
of it which are within us" (II, 185). "It is then this varied world of
ideas within us which forms the sole material directly given to us"
(II, 186). As it is the only material given to us, so it is the only
material with which thought can end. To talk about knowing the
external world through ideas which are merely within us is to talk of
an inherent self-contradiction. There is no common ground in which the
external world and our ideas can meet. In other words, the original
separation between an independent thought-material and an independent
thought-function and purpose lands us inevitably in the metaphysics of
subjective idealism, plus a belief in an unknown reality beyond, which
although unknowable is yet taken as the ultimate test of the value of
our ideas. At the end, after all our maneuvering we are where we
began: with two separate disparates, one of meaning, but no existence,
the other of existence, but no meaning.
The other aspect of Lotze's contradiction which completes the circle
is clear when we refer to his original propositions, and recall that
at the outset he was compelled to regard the origination and
conjunctions of the impressions, the elements of ideas, as themselves
the effects exercised by a world of things already in existence (see
p. 31). He sets up an independent world of thought, and yet has to
confess that both at its origin and at its termination it points with
absolute necessity to a world beyond itself. Only the stubborn refusal
to take this initial and terminal reference of thought beyond itself
as having a _historic_ or temporal meaning, indicating a particular
place of generation and a particular point of fulfilment, compels
Lotze to give such objective references a transcendental turn.
When Lotze goes on to say (II, 191) that the measure of truth of
particular parts of experience is found in asking whether, when judged
by thought, they are in harmony with other parts of experience; when
he goes on to say that there is no sense in trying to compare the
entire world of ideas with a reality which is non-existent (excepting
as it itself should become an idea), he lands where he might better
have frankly commenced.[45] He saves himself from utter skepticism
only by claiming that the explicit assumption of skepticism--the need
of agreement of a ready-made idea as such with an extraneous
ready-made material as such--is meaningless. He defines correctly the
work of thought as consisting in harmonizing the various portions of
experience with each other. In this case the test of thought is the
harmony or unity of experience actually effected. The test of validity
of thought is beyond thought, just as at the other limit thought
originates out of a situation which is not dependent upon thought.
Interpret this before and beyond in a historic sense, as an affair of
the place occupied and rôle played by thinking as a function in
experience in relation to other non-intellectual experiences of
things, and then the intermediate and instrumental character of
thought, its dependence upon unreflective antecedents for its
existence, and upon a consequent experience for its final test,
becomes significant and necessary. Taken at large, apart from temporal
development and control, it plunges us in the depths of a hopelessly
complicated and self-revolving metaphysic.