The form or mode of thought which marks the continued transformation of the data and the idea in reference to each other is judgment. Judgment makes explicit the assumption of a principle which determines connection within an individualized whole. It definitely states red asthiscase or instance of the law or process of color, and thus further overcomes the defect insubject-matteror data still left by conception.[29]Now judgment logically terminates in disjunction. It gives a universal which may determineany one of a number of alternative defined particulars, but which is arbitrary as towhatone is selected. Systematicinferencebrings to light the material conditions under which the law, or dominating universal, applies to this, rather than that alternative particular, and so completes the ideal organization of the subject-matter. If this act were complete, we should finally have present to us a whole on which weshould know the determining and effective or authorizing elements, and the order of development or hierarchy of dependence, in which others follow from them.[30]
In this account by Lotze of the operations of the forms of thought, there is clearly put before us the picture of a continuous correlative determination of datum on one side and of idea or meaning on the other, till experience is again integral, data being thoroughly defined and connected, and ideas being the relevant meanings of subject-matter. That we have here in outline a description of what actually occurs there can be no doubt. But there is as little doubt that the description is thoroughly inconsistent with Lotze's supposition that the material or data of thought is precisely the same as the antecedent of thought; or that ideas, conceptions, are purely mental somewhats extraneously brought to bear, as the sole essential characteristics of thought, upon a material provided ready-made. It means but one thing: The maintenance of unity and wholeness in experience through conflicting contents occurs by means of a strictly correspondent setting apart of facts to be accurately described and properly related, and meanings to be adequately construed and properly referred. The datum is giveninthe thought-situation, andtofurther qualification of ideas or meanings. But even in thisaspect it presents a problem. To find outwhat isgiven is an inquiry which taxes reflection to the uttermost. Every important advance in scientific method means better agencies, more skilled technique for simply detaching and describing what is barely there, or given. To be able to find out what can safely be taken asthere, as given in any particular inquiry, and hence be taken as material for orderly and verifiable inference, for fruitful hypothesis-making, for entertaining of explanatory and interpretative ideas, is one phase of the effort of systematic scientific inquiry. It marks its inductive phase. To take what is discovered to be reliable evidence within a more complexsituationas if it were given absolutely and in isolation, or apart from a particular historic situs and context, is the fallacy of empiricism as a logical theory. To regard the thought-forms of conception, judgment, and inference as qualifications of "pure thought, apart from any difference in objects," instead of as successive dispositions in the progressive organization of the material (or objects), is the fallacy of rationalism. Lotze, like Kant, attempts to combine the two, thinking thereby to correct each by the other.
Lotze recognizes the futility of thought if the sense data as data are final, if they alone are real, the truly existent, self-justificatory and valid. He sees that, if the empiricist were right in his assumption as to the real worth of the given data, thinking would be a ridiculous pretender, either toilfully and poorly doingover again what needs no doing, or making a wilful departure from truth. He realizes that thought is evoked because it is needed; and that it has a work to do which is not merely formal, but which effects a modification of the subject-matter of experience. Consequently he assumes a thought-in-itself, with certain forms and modes of action of its own, a realm of meaning possessed of a directive and normative worth of its own—the root-fallacy of rationalism. His attempted compromise between the two turns out to be based on the assumption of the indefensible ideas of both—the notion of an independent matter given to thought, on one side, and of an independent worth or force of thought-forms, on the other.
This pointing out of inconsistencies becomes stale and unprofitable save as we bring them back into connection with their root-origin—the erection of distinctions that are genetic and historic, and working or instrumental divisions of labor, into rigid and ready-made structural differences of reality. Lotze clearly recognizes that thought's nature is dependent upon its aim, its aim upon its problem, and this upon the situation in which it finds its incentive and excuse. Its work is cut out for it. It does not what it would, but what it must. As Lotze puts it, "Logic has to do with thought, not as it would be under hypothetical conditions, but as it is" (I, 33), and this statement is made in explicit combination with statements to the effect that the peculiarity of the material of thoughtconditions its activity. Similarly he says, in a passage already referred to: "The possibility and the success of thought's production in general depends upon this original constitution and organization of the whole world of ideas, a constitution which, though not necessary in thought, is all the more necessary to make thought possible."[31]
As we have seen, the essential nature of conception, judgment, and inference is dependent upon peculiarities of the propounded material, they being forms dependent for their significance upon the stage of organization in which they begin.
From this only one conclusion is possible. If thought's nature is dependent upon its actual conditions and circumstances, the primary logical problem is to study thought-in-its-conditioning; it is to detect the crisis within which thought and its subject-matter present themselves in their mutual distinction and cross-reference. But Lotze is so thoroughly committed to a ready-made antecedent of some sort, that this genetic consideration is of no account to him. The historic method is a mere matter of psychology, and has no logical worth (I, 2). We must presuppose a psychological mechanism and psychological material, but logic is concerned not with origin or history, but with authority, worth, value (I, 10). Again: "Logic is not concerned with the manner in which the elements utilized by thought come intoexistence, but their valueafterthey have somehow come into existence, for the carrying out of intellectual operations" (I, 34). And finally: "I have maintained throughout my work that logic cannot derive any serious advantage from a discussion ofthe conditions under which thought as a psychological process comes about. The significance of logical forms ... is to be found in the utterances of thought, the laws which it imposes, after or during the act of thinking, not in the conditions which lie back of any which produce thought."[32]
Lotze, in truth, represents a halting-stage in the evolution of logical theory. He is too far along to be contented with the reiteration of the purely formal distinctions of a merely formal thought-by-itself. He recognizes that thought as formal is the form of some matter, and has its worth only as organizing that matter to meet the ideal demands of reason; and that "reason" is in truth only an adequate systematization of the matter or content. Consequently he has to open the door to admit "psychical processes" which furnish this material. Having let in the material, he is bound to shut the door again in the face of the processes from which the material proceeded—to dismiss them as impertinent intruders.If thought gets its data in such a surreptitious manner, there is no occasion for wonder that the legitimacy of its dealings with the material remains an open question. Logical theory, like every branch of thephilosophic disciplines, waits upon a surrender of the obstinate conviction that, while the work and aim of thought is conditioned by the material supplied to it, yet theworthof its performances is something to be passed upon in complete abstraction from conditions of origin and development.
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) therelationshipsof 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 psychicalimpression 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 thepossibilityof such a content—its consistency with Lotze's fundamental premises; secondly, itsobjectivecharacter—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.Meaningis 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 allto sense and afterwards attributing all to thought, and, finally, of attributing it to thought only because it was already in its material. Thisseesawis 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 athought, they each require some previous shaping to make them into logical building-stones and to convert them fromimpressionsintoideas. 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 thoughtexactly 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 simplyde factorelations 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 thenecessary 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 orlogicalthought 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 constitutedbythought and the same material just presentedtothought, 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 asecondphase of thought which is intermediary between this and the third phase, viz., reflective thought proper. This second activityis 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 thesameas 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 feelingsubject; secondly, the effect which this objectification has upon the matter in relation toother 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, canonly 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 dissensionof 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 twoas mutually referredare 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 andunorganized; 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 anobjectfor 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 forothers 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 ofmetaphysicalreality (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 isde factopresented to the consciousness of all alike? Does this coequal presence guarantee an objectivity? Or does validity attachto a given meaning or content in the sense that it directs and controls the further exercise of thinking, and thus the formation of furthernewobjects 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 constructioncould 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 aregionof experience, to a region of mutually determining social activities. The conception that reference to asocialactivity 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 ade factosomewhat for every consciousness), for the genuine definition of object as adeterminantin 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 ideaof 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 andheldapart 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 anexperience 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 isanyexistence 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 maintainedonlyin 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 whichdo 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 effectingan 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 ameretool. In the latter case the external scaffolding isnotthe instrumentality; the actual tool is theactionof 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; itisthe 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,isthe 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 ofreaching 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 adaptationtoan endthroughthe adjustment of particular objective contents.
The thinker, like the carpenter, is at once stimulated and checked in every stage of his procedure bythe 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 (seeante, 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 questionof 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 lastLotze can dispose of this question only by regarding it as a metaphysical, not a logical, problem (II, 281, 282). In other words,logicallyspeaking, 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 webegan: 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 ahistoricor 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 fromutter 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.
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. Itssuccessive 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 alternativeand 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 realitycorresponding to it"; of supposing that general and abstract words have their equivalent objects somewherein 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. Socialcustoms 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 doesnot 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 onlywhen 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, andagainst 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 termsVerstand—the understanding. "Apart fromVerstand," he says, "thereis no fixity or accuracy in the region either of theory or practice"; and, again, "Verstandsticks 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 thewayin which we fix the idea—the manner of the inquiry which results in definition. Wetakethe 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 havecome 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 frictionof 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 theirrigidity. 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, andthe 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 whichproblems 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, notafterit has been demonstrated—and is thus capableof 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 thede factoshaking of received ideas and a discrediting of all thinking. It was concerned rather with thevirtual 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.