The man in the street, when asked what he thinks about a certain
matter, often replies that he does not think at all; he knows. The
suggestion is that thinking is a case of active uncertainty set over
against conviction or unquestioning assurance. When he adds that he
does not have to think, but knows, the further implication is that
thinking, when needed, leads to knowledge; that its purpose or object
is to secure stable equilibrium. It is the purpose of this paper to
show some of the main stages through which thinking, understood in
this way, actually passes in its attempt to reach its most effective
working; that is, the maximum of reasonable certainty.
I wish to show how a variety of modes of thinking, easily recognizable
in the progress of both the race and the individual, may be identified
and arranged as successive species of the relationship which doubting
bears to assurance; as various ratios, so to speak, which the vigor of
doubting bears to mere acquiescence. The presumption is that the
function of questioning is one which has continually grown in
intensity and range, that doubt is continually chased back, and, being
cornered, fights more desperately, and thus clears the ground more
thoroughly. Its successive stations or arrests constitute stages of
thinking. Or to change the metaphor, just in the degree that what has
been accepted as fact--the object of assurance--loses stable
equilibrium, the tension involved in the questioning attitude
increases, until a readjustment gives a new and less easily shaken
equilibrium.
The natural tendency of man is not to press home a doubt, but to cut
inquiry as short as possible. The practical man's impatience with
theory has become a proverb; it expresses just the feeling that, since
the thinking process is of use only in substituting certainty for
doubt, any apparent prolongation of it is useless speculation, wasting
time and diverting the mind from important issues. To follow the line
of least resistance is to cut short the stay in the sphere of doubts
and suggestions, and to make the speediest return into the world where
one can act. The result, of course, is that difficulties are evaded or
surmounted rather than really disposed of. Hence, in spite of the
opposition of the would-be practical man, the needs of practice, of
economy, and of efficiency have themselves compelled a continual
deepening of doubt and widening of the area of investigation.
It is within this evolution that we have to find our stages of
thinking. The initial stage is where the doubt is hardly endured but
not entertained; it is no welcome guest but an intruder, to be got rid
of as speedily as possible. Development of alternative and competitive
suggestions, the forming of suppositions (of ideas), goes but a little
way. The mind seizes upon the nearest or most convenient instrument of
dismissing doubt and reattaining security. At the other end is the
definitive and conscious search for problems, and the development of
elaborate and systematized methods of investigation--the industry and
technique of science. Between these limits come processes which have
started out upon the path of doubt and inquiry, and then halted by the
way.
In the first stage of the journey, beliefs are treated as something
fixed and static. To those who are using them they are simply another
kind of fact. They are used to settle doubts, but the doubts are
treated as arising quite outside the ideas themselves. Nothing is
further from recognition than that ideas themselves are open to doubt,
or need criticism and revision. Indeed, the one who uses static
meanings is not even aware that they originated and have been
elaborated for the sake of dealing with conflicts and problems. The
ideas are just "there," and they may be used like any providential
dispensation to help men out of the troubles into which they have
fallen.
Words are generally held responsible for this fixation of the idea,
for this substantiation of it into a kind of thing. A long line of
critics has made us familiar with the invincible habit "of supposing
that wherever there is a name there is some reality corresponding to
it"; of supposing that general and abstract words have their
equivalent objects somewhere _in rerum natura_, as have also singular
and proper names. We know with what simplicity of self-confidence the
English empirical school has accounted for the ontological speculation
of Plato. Words tend to fix intellectual contents, and give them a
certain air of independence and individuality. That some truth is here
expressed there can be no question. Indeed, the attitude of mind of
which we are speaking is well illustrated in the person who goes to
the dictionary in order to settle some problem in morals, politics, or
science; who would end some discussion regarding a material point by
learning what meaning is attached to terms by the dictionary as
authority. The question is taken as lying outside of the sphere of
science or intellectual inquiry, since the meaning of the word--the
idea--is unquestionable and fixed.
But this petrifying influence of words is after all only a superficial
explanation. There must be some meaning present or the word could not
fix it; there must be something which accounts for the disposition to
use names as a medium of fossilization. There is, in truth, a certain
real fact--an existent reality--behind both the word and the meaning
it stands for. This reality is social usage. The person who consults a
dictionary is getting an established fact when he turns there for the
definition of a term. He finds the sense in which the word is
currently used. Social customs are no less real than physical events.
It is not possible to dispose of this fact of common usage by
reference to mere convention, or any other arbitrary device. A form of
social usage is no more an express invention than any other social
institution. It embodies the permanent attitude, the habit taken
toward certain recurring difficulties or problems in experience.
Ideas, or meanings fixed in terms, show the scheme of values which the
community uses in appraising matters that need consideration and which
are indeterminate or unassured. They are held up as standards for all
its members to follow. Here is the solution of the paradox. The fixed
or static idea is a fact expressing an established social attitude, a
custom. It is not merely verbal, because it denotes a force which
operates, as all customs do, in controlling particular cases. But
since it marks a mode of interpretation, a scheme for assigning
values, a way of dealing with doubtful cases, it falls within the
sphere of ideas. Or, coming to the life of the individual, the fixed
meaning represents, not a state of consciousness fixed by a name, but
a recognition of a habitual way of belief: a habit of understanding.
We find an apt illustration of fixed ideas in the rules prevalent in
primitive communities, rules which minutely determine all acts in
which the community as a whole is felt to have an interest. These
rules are facts because they express customs, and carry with them
certain sanctions. Their meaning does not cease with judicial
utterance. They are made valid at once in a practical way against
anyone who departs from them. Yet as rules they are ideas, for they
express general ways of defining doubtful matters in experience and of
re-establishing certainty. An individual may fail in acknowledgment of
them and explicit reference is then necessary. For one who has lost
himself in the notion that ideas are psychical and subjective, I know
of no better way to appreciate the significance of an idea than to
consider that a social rule of judgment is nothing but a certain way
of viewing or interpreting facts; as such it is an idea.
The point that is of special interest to us here, however, is that
these ideas are taken as fixed and unquestionable, and that the cases
to which they are to apply are regarded as in themselves equally
fixed. So far as concerns the attitude of those who employ this sort
of ideas, the doubt is simply as to what idea should be in a
particular case. Even the Athenian Greeks, for instance, long kept up
the form of indicting and trying a tree or implement through which
some individual had been killed. There was a rule--a fixed idea--for
dealing with all who offended against the community by destroying one
of its citizens. The fact that an inanimate object, a thing without
intention or volition, offended was not a material circumstance. It
made no difference in the case; that is, there was no doubt as to the
nature of the fact. It was as fixed as was the rule.
With advance in the complexity of life, however, rules accumulate, and
discrimination--that is, a certain degree of inquiring and critical
attitude--enters in. Inquiry takes effect, however, in seeking among a
collection of fixed ideas just the one to be used, rather than in
directing suspicion against any rule or idea as such, or in an attempt
to discover or constitute a new one. It is hardly necessary to refer
to the development of casuistry, or to the multiplication of
distinctions within dogmas, or to the growth of ceremonial law in
cumbrous detail, to indicate what the outcome of this logical stage is
likely to be. The essential thing is that doubt and inquiry are
directed neither at the nature of the intrinsic fact itself, nor at
the value of the idea as such, but simply at the manner in which one
is attached to the other. Thinking falls outside both fact and idea,
and into the sphere of their external connection. It is still a
fiction of judicial procedure that there is already in existence some
custom or law under which every possible dispute--that is, every
doubtful or unassured case--falls, and that the judge only declares
which law is applicable in the particular case. This point of view has
tremendously affected the theory of logic in its historic development.
One of the chief, perhaps the most important, instrumentalities in
developing and maintaining fixed ideas is the need of instruction and
the way in which it is given. If ideas were called into play only
when doubtful cases actually arise, they could not help retaining a
certain amount of vitality and flexibility; but the community always
instructs its new members as to its way of disposing of these cases
before they present themselves. Ideas are proffered, in other words,
separated from present doubt and remote from application, in order to
escape future difficulties and the need of any thinking. In primitive
communities this is the main purport of instruction, and it remains
such to a very considerable degree. There is a prejudgment rather than
judgment proper. When the community uses its resources to fix certain
ideas in the mind--that is, certain ways of interpreting and regarding
experience--ideas are necessarily formulated so as to assume a rigid
and independent form. They are doubly removed from the sphere of
doubt. The attitude is uncritical and dogmatic in the extreme--so much
so that one might question whether it is to be properly designated as
a stage of thinking.
In this form ideas become the chief instruments of social
conservation. Judicial decision and penal correction are restricted
and ineffective methods of maintaining social institutions unchanged,
compared with instilling in advance uniform ideas--fixed modes of
appraising all social questions and issues. These set ideas thus
become the embodiment of the values which any group has realized and
intends to perpetuate. The fixation supports them against dissipation
through attrition of circumstance, and against destruction through
hostile attack. It would be interesting to follow out the ways in
which such values are put under the protection of the gods and of
religious rites, or themselves erected into quasi-divinities--as among
the Romans. This, however, would hardly add anything to the logic of
the discussion, although it would indicate the importance attached to
the fixation of ideas, and the thoroughgoing character of the means
used to secure immobilization.
The conserving value of the dogmatic attitude, the point of view which
takes ideas as fixed, is not to be ignored. When society has no methods
of science for protecting and perpetuating its achieved values, there
is practically no other resort than such crystallization. Moreover,
with any possible scientific progress, some equivalent of the fixed
idea must remain. The nearer we get to the needs of action the greater
absoluteness must attach to ideas. The necessities of action do not
await our convenience. Emergencies continually present themselves where
the fixity required for successful activity cannot be attained through
the medium of investigation. The alternative to vacillation, confusion,
and futility of action is importation to ideas of a positive and
secured character, not in strict logic belonging to them. It is this
sort of determination that Hegel seems to have in mind in what he terms
_Verstand_--the understanding. "Apart from _Verstand_," he says,
"there is no fixity or accuracy in the region either of theory or
practice"; and, again, "_Verstand_ sticks to fixity of characters and
their distinctions from one another; it treats every meaning as having
a subsistence of its own." In technical terminology, also, this is what
is meant by "positing" ideas--hardening meanings.
In recognizing, however, that fixation of intellectual content is a
precondition of effective action, we must not overlook the
modification that comes with the advance of thinking into more
critical forms. At the outset fixity is taken as the rightful
possession of the ideas themselves; it belongs to them and is their
"essence." As the scientific spirit develops, we see that it is we who
lend fixity to the ideas, and that this loan is for a purpose to which
the meaning of the ideas is accommodated. Fixity ceases to be a matter
of intrinsic structure of ideas, and becomes an affair of security in
using them. Hence the important thing is the _way_ in which we fix the
idea--the manner of the inquiry which results in definition. We _take_
the idea as if it were fixed, in order to secure the necessary
stability of action. The crisis past, the idea drops its borrowed
investiture, and reappears as surmise.
When we substitute for ideas as uniform rules by which to decide
doubtful cases that making over of ideas which is requisite to make
them fit, the quality of thought alters. We may fairly say that we
have come into another stage. The idea is now regarded as essentially
subject to change, as a manufactured article needing to be made ready
for use. To determine the conditions of this transition lies beyond my
purpose, since I have in mind only a descriptive setting forth of the
periods through which, as a matter of fact, thought has passed in the
development of the inquiry function, without raising the problem of
its "why" and "how." At this point we shall not do more than note
that, as the scheduled stock of fixed ideas grows larger, their
application to specific questions becomes more difficult, prolonged,
and roundabout. There has to be a definite hunting for the specific
idea which is appropriate; there has to be comparison of it with other
ideas. This comes to involve a certain amount of mutual compromise and
modification before selection is possible. The idea thus gets somewhat
shaken. It has to be made over so that it may harmonize with other
ideas possessing equal worth. Often the very accumulation of fixed
ideas commands this reconstruction. The dead weight of the material
becomes so great that it cannot sustain itself without a readjustment
of the center of gravity. Simplification and systematization are
required, and these call for reflection. Critical cases come up in
which the fiction of an idea or rule already in existence cannot be
maintained. It is impossible to conceal that old ideas have to be
radically modified before the situation can be dealt with. The
friction of circumstance melts away their congealed fixity. Judgment
becomes legislative.
Seeking illustrations at large, we find this change typified in Hebrew
history in the growing importance of the prophet over the judge, in
the transition from a justification of conduct through bringing
particular cases into conformity with existent laws, into that
effected by personal right-mindedness enabling the individual to see
the law in each case for himself. Profoundly as this changed
conception of the relation between law and particular case affected
moral life, it did not, among Semites, directly influence the logical
sphere. With the Greeks, however, we find a continuous and marked
departure from positive declaration of custom. We have assemblies
meeting to discuss and dispute, and finally, upon the basis of the
considerations thus brought to view, to decide. The man of counsel is
set side by side with the man of deed. Odysseus was much experienced,
not only because he knew the customs and ways of old, but even more
because from the richness of his experience he could make the pregnant
suggestion to meet the new crisis. It is hardly too much to say that
it was the emphasis put by the Greek mind upon discussion--at first as
preliminary to decision, and afterward to legislation--which generated
logical theory.
Discussion is thus an apt name for this attitude of thought. It is
bringing various beliefs together; shaking one against another and
tearing down their rigidity. It is conversation of thoughts; it is
dialogue--the mother of dialectic in more than the etymological sense.
No process is more recurrent in history than the transfer of
operations carried on between different persons into the arena of the
individual's own consciousness. The discussion which at first took
place by bringing ideas from different persons into contact, by
introducing them into the forum of competition, and by subjecting them
to critical comparison and selective decision, finally became a habit
of the individual with himself. He became a miniature social
assemblage, in which pros and cons were brought into play struggling
for the mastery--for final conclusion. In some such way we conceive
reflection to be born.
It is evident that discussion, the agitation of ideas, if judged from
the standpoint of the older fixed ideas, is a destructive process.
Ideas are not only shaken together and apart, they are so shaken in
themselves that their whole validity becomes doubtful. Mind, and not
merely beliefs, becomes uncertain. The attempt to harmonize different
ideas means that in themselves they are discrepant. The search for a
conclusion means that accepted ideas are only points of view, and
hence personal affairs. Needless to say it was the Sophists who
emphasized and generalized this negative aspect--this presupposition
of loss of assurance, of inconsistency, of "subjectivity." They took
it as applying not only to this, that, and the other idea, but to
ideas as ideas. Since ideas are no longer fixed contents, they are
just expressions of an individual's way of thinking. Lacking inherent
value, they merely express the interests that induce the individual to
look this way rather than that. They are made by the individual's
point of view, and hence will be unmade if he can be led to change his
point of view. Where all was fixity, now all is instability: where all
was certitude, nothing now exists save opinion based on prejudice,
interest, or arbitrary choice.
The modern point of view, while condemning sophistry, yet often agrees
with it in limiting the reflective attitude as such to self-involution
and self-conceit. From Bacon down, the appeal is to observation, to
attention to facts, to concern with the external world. The sole
genuine guaranty of truth is taken to be appeal to facts, and thinking
as such is something different. If reflection is not considered to be
merely variable matter, it is considered to be at least an endless
mulling over of things. It is the futile attempt to spin truth out of
inner consciousness. It is introspection, and theorizing, and mere
speculation.
Such wholesale depreciation ignores the value inherent even in the
most subjective reflection, for it takes the settled estate which is
proof that thought is not needed, or that it has done its work, as if
it supplied the standard for the occasions in which problems are hard
upon us, and doubt is rife. It takes the conditions which come about
after and because we have thought to measure the conditions which call
out thinking. Whenever we really need to reflect, we cannot appeal
directly to the "fact," for the adequate reason that the stimulus to
thinking arises just because "facts" have slipped away from us. The
fallacy is neatly committed by Mill in his discussion of Whewell's
account of the need of mental conception or hypothesis in
"colligating" facts. He insists that the conception is "obtained" from
the "facts" in which "it exists," is "impressed upon us from without,"
and also that it is the "darkness and confusion" of the facts that
make us want the conception in order to create "light and order."[46]
Reflection involves running over various ideas, sorting them out,
comparing one with another, trying to get one which will unite in
itself the strength of two, searching for new points of view,
developing new suggestions; guessing, suggesting, selecting, and
rejecting. The greater the problem, and the greater the shock of doubt
and resultant confusion and uncertainty, the more prolonged and more
necessary is the process of "mere thinking." It is a more obvious
phase of biology than of physics, of sociology than of chemistry; but
it persists in established sciences. If we take even a mathematical
proposition, not _after_ it has been demonstrated--and is thus capable
of statement in adequate logical form--but while in process of
discovery and proof, the operation of this subjective phase is
manifest, so much so, indeed, that a distinguished modern
mathematician has said that the paths which the mathematical inquirer
traverses in any new field are more akin to those of the
experimentalist, and even to those of the poet and artist, than to
those of the Euclidean geometer.
What makes the essential difference between modern research and the
reflection of, say, the Greeks, is not the absence of "mere thinking,"
but the presence of conditions for testing its results; the elaborate
system of checks and balances found in the technique of modern
experimentation. The thinking process does not now go on endlessly in
terms of itself, but seeks outlet through reference to particular
experiences. It is tested by this reference; not, however, as if a
theory could be tested by directly comparing it with facts--an obvious
impossibility--but through use in facilitating commerce with facts. It
is tested as glasses are tested; things are looked at through the
medium of specific meanings to see if thereby they assume a more
orderly and clearer aspect, if they are less blurred and obscure.
The reaction of the Socratic school against the Sophistic may serve to
illustrate the third stage of thinking. This movement was not
interested in the _de facto_ shaking of received ideas and a
discrediting of all thinking. It was concerned rather with the
virtual appeal to a common denominator involved in bringing different
ideas into relation with one another. In their comparison and mutual
modification it saw evidence of the operation of a standard permanent
meaning passing judgment upon their conflict, and revealing a common
principle and standard of reference. It dealt not with the shaking and
dissolution, but with a comprehensive permanent Idea finally to
emerge. Controversy and discussion among different individuals may
result in extending doubt, manifesting the incoherency of accepted
ideas, and so throwing an individual into an attitude of distrust. But
it also involves an appeal to a single thought to be accepted by both
parties, thus putting an end to the dispute. This appeal to a higher
court, this possibility of attaining a total and abiding intellectual
object, which should bring into relief the agreeing elements in
contending thoughts, and banish the incompatible factors, animated the
Socratic search for the concept, the elaboration of the Platonic
hierarchy of Ideas in which the higher substantiate the lower, and the
Aristotelian exposition of the systematized methods by which general
truths may be employed to prove propositions otherwise doubtful. At
least, this historic development will serve to illustrate what is
involved in the transition from the second to the third stage; the
transformation of discussion into reasoning, of subjective reflection
into method of proof.
Discussion, whether with ourselves or others, goes on by suggestion of
clues, as the uppermost object of interest opens a way here or there.
It is discursive and haphazard. This gives it the devious tendency
indicated in Plato's remark that it needs to be tied to the post of
reason. It needs, that is, to have the ground or basis of its various
component statements brought to consciousness in such a way as to
define the exact value of each. The Socratic contention is the need of
compelling the common denominator, the common subject, underlying the
diversity of views to exhibit itself. It alone gives a sure standard
by which the claims of all assertions may be measured. Until this need
is met, discussion is a self-deceiving play with unjudged, unexamined
matters, which, confused and shifting, impose themselves upon us.
We are familiar enough with the theory that the Socratic universal,
the Platonic idea, was generated by an ignorant transformation of
psychological abstractions into self-existent entities. To insist upon
this as the key to the Socratic logic is mere caricature. The
objectivity of the universal stood for the sense of something decisive
and controlling in all reflection, which otherwise is just
manipulation of personal prejudices. This sense is as active in modern
science as it was in the Platonic dialectic. What Socrates felt was
the opinionated, conceited quality of the terms used in the moral and
political discussion of his day, as that contrasted with the
subject-matter, which, if rightly grasped, would put an end to mere
views and argumentations.
By Aristotle's time the interest was not so much in the existence of
standards of decision in cases of doubt and dispute as in the
technique of their use. The judge was firmly seated on the bench. The
parties in controversy recognized his jurisdiction, and their
respective claims were submitted for adjudicature. The need was for
rules of procedure by which the judge might, in an obvious and
impartial way, bring the recognized universal or decisive law to bear
upon particular matters. Hence the elaboration of those rules of
evidence, those canons of demonstrative force, which are the backbone
of the Aristotelian logic. There was a code by which to decide upon
the admissibility and value of proffered testimony--the rules of the
syllogism. The figures and terms of the syllogism provided a scheme
for deciding upon the exact bearing of every statement propounded. The
plan of arrangement of major and minor premises, of major, minor, and
middle terms, furnished a manifesto of the exact procedure to be
followed in determining the probative force of each element in
reasoning. The judge knew what testimony to permit, when and how it
should be introduced, how it could be impeached or have its competence
lessened, and how the evidence was to be arranged so that a summary
would also be an exhibit of its value in establishing a conclusion.
This means that there now is a distinctive type of thinking marked off
from mere discussion and reflection. It may be called either reasoning
or proof. It is reasoning when we think of the regularity of the
method for getting at and employing the unquestioned grounds which
give validity to other statements. It is proof as regards the degree
of logical desert thereby measured out to such propositions. Proof is
the acceptance or rejection justified through the reasoning. To quote
from Mill: "To give credence to a proposition as a conclusion from
something else is to reason in the most extensive sense of the term.
We say of a fact or statement, it is proved, when we believe its truth
by reason of some other fact or statement from which it is said to
follow."[47] Reasoning is marshaling a series of terms and
propositions until we can bind some doubtful fact firmly to an
unquestioned, although remote, truth; it is the regular way in which a
certain proposition is brought to bear on a precarious one, clothing
the latter with something of the peremptory quality of the former. So
far as we reach this result, and so far as we can exhibit each step in
the nexus and be sure it has been rightly performed, we have proof.
But questions still face us. How about that truth upon which we fall
back as guaranteeing the credibility of other statements--how about
our major premise? Whence does it derive its guaranty? _Quis custodes
custodiet?_
We may, of course, in turn subsume it under some further major
premise, but an infinite regress is impossible, and on this track we
are finally left hanging in the air. For _practical_ purposes the
unquestioned principle may be taken as signifying mutual concession or
agreement--it denotes that as a matter of fact its truth is not called
in question by the parties concerned. This does admirably for settling
arguments and controversies. It is a good way of amicably arranging
matters among those already friends and fellow-citizens. But
scientifically the widespread acceptance of an idea seems to testify
to custom rather than to truth; prejudice is strengthened in
influence, but hardly in value, by the number who share it; conceit is
none the less self-conceit because it turns the heads of many.
Great interest was indeed afterward taken in the range of persons who
hold truths in common. The _quod semper ubique omnibus_ became of
great importance. This, however, was not, in theory at least, because
common agreement was supposed to constitute the major premise, but
because it afforded confirmatory evidence of its self-evident and
universal character.
Hence the Aristotelian logic necessarily assumes certain first or
fundamental truths unquestioned and unquestionable, self-evident and
self-evidencing, neither established nor modified by thought, but
standing firm in their own right. This assumption was not, as modern
dealers in formal logic would sometimes have it, an external
psychological or metaphysical attachment to the theory of reasoning,
to be omitted at will from logic as such. It was an essential factor
of knowledge that there should be necessary propositions directly
apprehended by reason and particular ones directly apprehended by
sense. Reasoning could then join them. Without the truths we have only
the play of subjective, arbitrary, futile opinion. _Judgment_ has not
taken place, and assertion is without warrant. Hence the scheduling of
first truths is an organic part of any reasoning which is occupied
with securing demonstration, surety of assent, or valid conviction. To
deny the necessary place of ultimate truths in the logical system of
Aristotle and his followers is to make them players in a game of
social convention. It is to overlook, to invert, the fact that they
were sincerely concerned with the question of attaining the grounds
and process of assurance. Hence they were obliged to assume primary
intuitions, metaphysical, physical, moral, and mathematical axioms, in
order to get the pegs of certainty to which to tie the bundles of
otherwise contingent propositions.
It would be going too far to claim that the regard for the authority
of the church, of the fathers, of the Scriptures, of ancient writers,
of Aristotle himself, so characteristic of the Middle Ages, was the
direct outcome of this presupposition of truths fixed and
unquestionable in themselves. But the logical connection is sure. The
supply of absolute premises that Aristotle was able to proffer was
scant. In his own generation and situation this paucity made
comparatively little difference; for to the mass of men the great bulk
of values was still carried by custom, by religious belief, and social
institution. It was only in the comparatively small sphere of persons
who had come under the philosophic influence that need for the logical
mode of confirmation was felt. In the mediaeval period, however, all
important beliefs required to be concentrated by some fixed principle
giving them stay and power, for they were contrary to obvious
common-sense and natural tradition. The situation was exactly such as
to call into active use the Aristotelian scheme of thought. Authority
supplemented the meagerness of the store of universals known by direct
intuition, the Aristotelian plan of reasoning afforded the precise
instrumentality through which the vague and chaotic details of life
could be reduced to order by subjecting them to authoritative rules.
It is not enough, however, to account for the ultimate major premises,
for the unconditioned grounds upon which credibility is assigned. We
have also to report where the other side comes from: matters so
uncertain in themselves as to require that they have their grounds
supplied from outside. The answer in the Aristotelian scheme is an
obvious one. It is the very nature of sense, of ordinary experience,
to supply us with matters which in themselves are only contingent.
There is a certain portion of the intellectual sphere, that derived
from experience, which is infected throughout by its unworthy origin.
It stands forever condemned to be merely empirical--particular, more
or less accidental, inherently irrational. You cannot make gold from
dross, and the best that can be done for and with material of this
sort is to bring it under the protection of truth which has warrant
and weight in itself.
We may now characterize this stage of thinking with reference to our
original remark that different stages denote various degrees in the
evolution of the doubt-inquiry function. As compared with the period
of fixed ideas, doubt is awake, and inquiry is active, but in itself
it is rigidly limited. On one side it is bounded by fixed ultimate
truths, whose very nature is that they cannot be doubted, which are
not products or functions in inquiry, but bases that investigation
fortunately rests upon. In the other direction all "matters of fact,"
all "empirical truths" belong to a particular sphere or kind of
existence, and one intrinsically open to suspicion. The region is
condemned in a wholesale way. In itself it exhales doubt; it cannot be
reformed; it is to be shunned, or, if this is not possible, to be
escaped from by climbing up a ladder of intermediate terms until we
lay hold on the universal. The very way in which doubt is objectified,
taken all in a piece, marks its lack of vitality. It is arrested and
cooped up in a particular place. As with any doubtful character, the
less of its company the better. Uncertainty is not realized as a
necessary instrument in compelling experienced matters to reveal their
meaning and inherent order.
This limitation upon inquiry settles the interpretation to be given
thought at this stage--it is of necessity merely connective, merely
mediating. It goes between the first principles--themselves, as to
their validity, outside the province of thought--and the particulars
of sense--also, as to their status and worth, beyond the dominion of
thought. Thinking is subsumption--just placing a particular
proposition under its universal. It is inclusion, finding a place for
some questioned matter within a region taken as more certain. It is
use of general truths to afford support to things otherwise shaky--an
application that improves their standing, while leaving their content
unchanged. This means that thought has only a formal value. It is of
service in exhibiting and arranging grounds upon which any particular
proposition may be acquitted or condemned, upon which anything already
current may be assented to, or upon which belief may reasonably be
withheld.
The metaphor of the law court is apt. There is assumed some matter to
be either proved or disproved. As matter, as content, it is
furnished. It is not to be found out. In the law court it is not a
question of discovering what a man specifically is, but simply of
finding reasons for regarding him as guilty or innocent. There is no
all-around play of thought directed to the institution of something as
fact, but a question of whether grounds can be adduced justifying
acceptance of some proposition already set forth. The significance of
such an attitude comes into relief when we contrast it with what is
done in the laboratory. In the laboratory there is no question of
proving that things are just thus and so, or that we must accept or
reject a given statement; there is simply an interest in finding out
what sort of things we are dealing with. Any quality or change that
presents itself may be an object of investigation, or may suggest a
conclusion; for it is judged, not by reference to pre-existent truths,
but by its suggestiveness, by what it may lead to. The mind is open to
inquiry in any direction. Or we may illustrate by the difference
between the auditor and an actuary in an insurance company. One simply
passes and rejects, issues vouchers, compares and balances statements
already made out. The other investigates any one of the items of
expense or receipt; inquires how it comes to be what it is, what
facts, as regards, say, length of life, condition of money market,
activity of agents, are involved, and what further researches and
activities are indicated.
The illustrations of the laboratory and the expert remind us of
another attitude of thought in which investigation attacks matters
hitherto reserved. The growth, for example, of freedom of thought
during the Renaissance was a revelation of the intrinsic momentum of
the thought-process itself. It was not a mere reaction from and
against mediaeval scholasticism. It was the continued operation of the
machinery which the scholastics had set a-going. Doubt and inquiry
were extended into the region of particulars, of matters of fact, with
the view of reconstituting them through discovery of their own
structure, no longer with the intention of leaving that unchanged
while transforming their claim to credence by connecting them with
some authoritative principles. Thought no longer found satisfaction in
appraising them in a scale of values according to their nearness to,
or remoteness from, fixed truths. Such work had been done to a nicety,
and it was futile to repeat it. Thinking must find a new outlet. It
was out of employment, and set to discover new lands. Galileo and
Copernicus were travelers--as much so as the crusader, Marco Polo, and
Columbus.
Hence the fourth stage--covering what is popularly known as inductive
and empirical science. Thought takes the form of inference instead of
proof. Proof, as we have already seen, is accepting or rejecting a
given proposition on the ground of its connection or lack of
connection with some other proposition conceded or established. But
inference does not terminate in any given proposition; it is after
precisely those not given. It wants more facts, different facts.
Thinking in the mode of inference insists upon terminating in an
intellectual advance, in a consciousness of truths hitherto escaping
us. Our thinking must not now "pass" certain propositions after
challenging them, must not admit them because they exhibit certain
credentials, showing a right to be received into the upper circle of
intellectual society. Thinking endeavors to compel things as they
present themselves, to yield up something hitherto obscure or
concealed. This advance and extension of knowledge through thinking
seems to be well designated by the term "inference." It does not
certify what is otherwise doubtful, but "goes from the known to the
unknown." It aims at pushing out the frontiers of knowledge, not at
marking those already attained with signposts. Its technique is not a
scheme for assigning status to beliefs already possessed, but is a
method for making friends with facts and ideas hitherto alien.
Inference reaches out, fills in gaps. Its work is measured not by the
patents of standing it issues, but by the material increments of
knowledge it yields. _Inventio_ is more important than _judicium_,
discovery than "proof."
With the development of empirical research, uncertainty or contingency
is no longer regarded as infecting in a wholesale way an entire
region, discrediting it save as it can be brought under the
protecting aegis of universal truths as major premises. Uncertainty is
now a matter of detail. It is the question whether the particular fact
is really what it has been taken to be. It involves contrast, not of a
fact as a fixed particular over against some fixed universal, but of
the existing mode of apprehension with another possible better
apprehension.
From the standpoint of reasoning and proof the intellectual field is
absolutely measured out in advance. Certainty is located in one part,
intellectual indeterminateness or uncertainty in another. But when
thinking becomes research, when the doubt-inquiry function comes to
its own, the problem is just: What is the fact?
Hence the extreme interest in details as such; in observing,
collecting, and comparing particular causes, in analysis of structure
down to its constituent elements, interest in atoms, cells, and in all
matters of arrangement in space and time. The microscope, telescope,
and spectroscope, the scalpel and microtome, the kymograph and the
camera are not mere material appendages to thinking; they are as
integral parts of investigative thought as were _Barbara_, _Celarent_,
etc., of the logic of reasoning. Facts must be discovered, and to
accomplish this, apparent "facts" must be resolved into their
elements. Things must be readjusted in order to be held free from
intrusion of impertinent circumstance and misleading suggestion.
Instrumentalities of extending and rectifying research are, therefore,
of themselves organs of thinking. The specialization of the sciences,
the almost daily birth of a new science, is a logical necessity--not a
mere historical episode. Every phase of experience must be
investigated, and each characteristic aspect presents its own peculiar
problems which demand, therefore, their own technique of
investigation. The discovery of difficulties, the substitution of
doubt for quiescent acceptance, are more important than the
sanctioning of belief through proof. Hence the importance of noting
apparent exceptions, negative instances, extreme cases, anomalies. The
interest is in the discrepant because that stimulates inquiry, not in
the fixed universal which would terminate it once for all. Hence the
roaming over the earth and through the skies for new facts which may
be incompatible with old theories, and which may suggest new points of
view.
To illustrate these matters in detail would be to write the history of
every modern science. The interest in multiplying phenomena, in
increasing the area of facts, in developing new distinctions of
quantity, structure, and form, is obviously characteristic of modern
science. But we do not always heed its logical significance--that it
makes thinking to consist in the extension and control of contact with
new material so as to lead regularly to the development of new
experience.
The elevation of the region of facts--the formerly condemned region of
the inherently contingent and variable--to something that invites and
rewards inquiry, defines the import, therefore, of the larger aspects
of modern science. This spirit prides itself upon being
positivistic--it deals with the observed and the observable. It will
have naught to do with ideas that cannot verify themselves by showing
themselves _in propria persona_. It is not enough to present
credentials from more sovereign truths. These are hardly acceptable
even as letters of introduction. Refutation of Newton's claim, that he
did not make hypotheses, by pointing out that no one was busier in
this direction than he, and that scientific power is generally in
direct ratio to ability to imagine possibilities, is as easy as it is
irrelevant. The hypotheses, the thoughts, that Newton employed were of
and about fact; they were for the sake of exacting and extending what
can be apprehended. Instead of being sacrosanct truths affording a
redemption by grace to facts otherwise ambiguous, they were the
articulating of ordinary facts. Hence the notion of law changes. It is
no longer something governing things and events from on high; it is
the statement of their own order.
Thus the exiling of occult forces and qualities is not so much a
specific achievement as it is a demand of the changed attitude. When
thinking consists in the detection and determination of observable
detail, forces, forms, qualities at large, are thrown out of
employment. They are not so much proved non-existent as rendered
nugatory. Disuse breeds their degeneration. When the universal is but
the order of the facts themselves, the mediating machinery disappears
along with the essences. There is substituted for the hierarchical
world in which each degree in the scale has its righteousness imputed
from above a world homogeneous in structure and in the scheme of its
parts; the same in heaven, earth, and the uttermost parts of the sea.
The ladder of values from the sublunary world with its irregular,
extravagant, imperfect motion up to the stellar universe, with its
self-returning perfect order, corresponded to the middle terms of the
older logic. The steps were graduated, ascending from the
indeterminate, unassured matter of sense up to the eternal,
unquestionable truths of rational perception. But when interest is
occupied in finding out what anything and everything is, any fact is
just as good as its fellow. The observable world is a democracy. The
difference which makes a fact what it is is not an exclusive
distinction, but a matter of position and quantity, an affair of
locality and aggregation, traits which place all facts upon the same
level, since all other observable facts also possess them and are,
indeed, conjointly responsible for them. Laws are not edicts of a
sovereign binding a world of subjects otherwise lawless; they are the
agreements, the compacts of facts themselves, or, in the familiar
language of Mill, the common attributes, the resemblances.
The emphasis of modern science upon control flows from the same
source. Interest is in the new, in extension, in discovery. Inference
is the advance into the unknown, the use of the established to win new
worlds from the void. This requires and employs regulation--that is,
method--in procedure. There cannot be a blind attack. A plan of
campaign is needed. Hence the so-called practical applications of
science, the Baconian "knowledge is power," the Comteian "science is
prevision," are not extra-logical addenda or supererogatory benefits.
They are intrinsic to the logical method itself, which is just the
orderly way of approaching new experiences so as to grasp and hold
them.
The attitude of research is necessarily toward the future. The
application of science to the practical affairs of life, as in the
stationary engine, or telephone, does not differ in principle from the
determination of wave-lengths of light through the experimental
control of the laboratory. Science lives only in arranging for new
contacts, new insights. The school of Kant agrees with that of Mill in
asserting that judgment must, in order to be judgment, be synthetic or
instructive; it must extend, inform, and purvey. When we recognize
that this service of judgment in effecting growth of experience is not
accidental, but that judgment means exactly the devising and using of
suitable instrumentalities for this end, we remark that the so-called
practical uses of science are only the further and freer play of the
intrinsic movement of discovery itself.
* * * * *
We began with the assumption that thought is to be interpreted as a
doubt-inquiry function, conducted for the purpose of arriving at that
mental equilibrium known as assurance or knowledge. We assumed that
various stages of thinking could be marked out according to the amount
of play which they give to doubt, and the consequent sincerity with
which thinking is identified with free inquiry. Modern scientific
procedure, as just set forth, seems to define the ideal or limit of
this process. It is inquiry emancipated, universalized, whose sole aim
and criterion is discovery, and hence it marks the terminus of our
description. It is idle to conceal from ourselves, however, that
scientific procedure as a practical undertaking, has not as yet
reflected itself into any coherent and generally accepted theory of
thinking, into any accepted doctrine of logic which is comparable to
the Aristotelian. Kant's conviction that logic is a "complete and
settled" science, which with absolutely "certain boundaries has gained
nothing and lost nothing since Aristotle," is startlingly contradicted
by the existing state of discussion of logical doctrine. The simple
fact of the case is that there are at least three rival theories on
the ground, each claiming to furnish the sole proper interpretation of
the actual procedure of thought.
The Aristotelian logic is far from having withdrawn its claim. It
still offers its framework as that into which the merely "empirical"
results of observation and experimental inquiry must be fitted if they
are to be regarded as really "proved." Another school of logicians,
starting professedly from modern psychology, discredits the whole
traditional industry and reverses the Aristotelian theory of validity;
it holds that only particular facts are self-supporting, and that the
authority allowed to general principles is derivative and second hand.
A third school of philosophy claims, by analysis of science and
experience, to justify the conclusion that the universe itself is a
construction of thought, giving evidence throughout of the pervasive
and constitutive action of reason, and holds, consequently, that our
logical processes are simply the reading off or coming to
consciousness of the inherently rational structure already possessed
by the universe in virtue of the presence within it of this pervasive
and constitutive action of thought. It thus denies both the claim of
the traditional logic, that matters of experienced fact are mere
particulars having their rationality in an external ground, and the
claim of the empirical logic, that thought is just a gymnastic by
which we vault from one presented fact to another remote in space and
time.
Which of the three doctrines is to be regarded as the legitimate
exponent of the procedure of thought manifested in modern science?
While the Aristotelian logic is willing to waive a claim to be
regarded as expounder of the actual procedure, it still insists upon
its right to be regarded as the sole ultimate umpire of the validity
or _proved_ character of the results reached. But the empirical and
transcendental logics stand face to face as rivals, each asserting
that it alone tells the story of what science does and how it does it.
With the consciousness of this conflict my discussion in its present,
or descriptive, phase must cease. Its close, however, suggests a
further question. In so far as we adopt the conception that thinking
is itself a doubt-inquiry process, must we not deny the claims of all
of the three doctrines to be the articulate voicing of the methods of
experimental science? Do they not all agree in setting up something
fixed outside inquiry, supplying both its material and its limit? That
the first principle and the empirical matters of fact of the
Aristotelian logic fall outside the thinking process, and condemn the
latter to a purely external and go-between agency, has been already
sufficiently descanted upon. But it is also true that the fixed
particulars, given facts, or sensations--whatever the empirical
logician starts from--are material given ready-made to the
thought-process, and externally limiting inquiry, instead of being
distinctions arising within and because of search for truth. Nor, as
regards this point, is the transcendental in any position to throw
stones at the empirical logic. Thought "in itself" is so far from a
process of inquiry that it is taken to be the eternal, fixed structure
of the universe; _our_ thinking, involving doubt and investigation, is
due wholly to our "finite," imperfect character, which condemns us to
the task of merely imitating and reinstating "thought" in itself, once
and forever complete, ready-made, fixed.
The practical procedure and practical assumptions of modern
experimental science, since they make thinking essentially and not
merely accidentally a process of discovery, seem irreconcilable with
both the empirical and transcendental interpretations. At all events
there is here sufficient discrepancy to give occasion for further
search: Does not an account of thinking, basing itself on modern
scientific procedure, demand a statement in which all the distinctions
and terms of thought--judgment, concept, inference, subject,
predicate, and copula of judgment, etc., _ad infinitum_--shall be
interpreted simply and entirely as distinctive functions or divisions
of labor within the doubt-inquiry process?