specific investigation are elements whose nature and functions will not interfere with their serving as units in the enterprise in hand. But from some other standpoint these new elements may be vastly more complex than the old, as is the case with the modern as compared with the ancient atom. When the elements are secured which operate successfully, the non-interfering connections can be ignored and the elements can be treated as if they did not have them—as if they were metaphysically simple. But there is no criterion for metaphysical simplicity except operative simplicity. To be simple is to serve as an element, and to serve as an element is to be simple.
It is scarcely necessary in view of the foregoing to add that the data of science are not "sense-data," if by sense-data be meant data which are the result of the operations of sense organs alone. Data are as much or more the result of operations, first, of the motor system of the scientist's own organism, and second, of all of the machinery of his laboratory which he calls to his aid. Whether named after the way they are obtained, or after the way they are used, data are quite as much "motor" as "sense." Nor, on the other hand, are there any purely intellectual data—not even for the mathematician. Some mathematicians may insist that their symbols and diagrams are merely stimuli to the platonic operation of pure and given universals. But until mathematics can get on without these symbols or any substitutes the intuitionist in mathematics will continue to have his say.
Wherever the discontinuity between logical operations and their acts persists, all the difficulties with data have their correlative difficulties with hypotheses. In Mill's logic the account of the origin of hypotheses oscillates between the view that they are happy guesses of a mind composed of states of consciousness, and the view that they are "found in the facts" or are "impressed on the mind by the facts." The miracle of relevancy required in the first position drives the theory to the second. And the tautologous, useless nature of the hypothesis in the second forces the theory back to the first view. In this predicament, little wonder Mill finds that the easiest way out is to make hypotheses "auxiliary" and not indigenous to inference. But this exclusion of hypotheses as essential leaves his account of inference to oscillate between the association of particulars of nominalism and scholastic formalism, from both of which Mill, with the dignified zeal of a prophet, set out to rescue logic.
Mill's rejection of hypotheses formed by a mind whose operations have no discoverable continuity with the operations of things, or by things whose actions are independent of the operations of ideas, is forever sound. But his acceptance of the discontinuity between the acts of knowing and the operation of things, and the conclusion that these two conceptions of the origin and nature of hypotheses are the only alternatives, were the source of most of his difficulties.
III
The efforts of classic empiricism at the reform of logic have long been an easy mark for idealistic reformers. But it is interesting to observe that the idealistic logic from the beginning finds itself in precisely the same predicament regarding hypotheses;—they are trifling or false. And in the end they are made, as in Mill, "accidents" of inference.
The part played by Kant's sense-material and the categories is almost the reverse of those of data and hypothesis in science. Sense material and the categories are the given elements from which objects are somehow made; in scientific procedure data and hypothesis are derived through logical observation and imagination from the content and operations of immediate experience. In Kant's account of the process by which objects are constructed we are nowhere in sight of any experimental procedure. Indeed, the real act of knowing, the selection and application of the category to the sense matter, is, as Kant in the end had to confess, "hidden away in the depths of the soul." Made in the presence of the elaborate machinery of knowing which Kant had constructed, this confession is almost tragic; and the tragic aspect grows when we find that the result of the "hidden" operation is merely a phenomenal object. That this should be the case, however, is not strange. A phenomenal object is the inevitable correlate of the "hidden" act of knowing whether in a "transcendental" or in an "empirical" logic. In vain do we call the act of knowing "constructive" and "synthetic" if its method of synthesis is hidden. A transcendental unity whose method is indefinable has no advantage over empirical association.
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