to work back and forth between the larger and the narrower fields, transforming every increment upon one side into a method of work upon the other, and thereby testing it. The apparent confusion of existing logical theory, its uncertainty as to its own bounds and limits, its tendency to oscillate from larger questions of the inherent worth of judgment and validity of inference over to details of scientific technique, and to translation of distinctions of formal logic into terms of an investigatory or verificatory process, are indications of the need of this double movement.
In the next three chapters it is proposed to take up some of the considerations that lie on the borderland between the larger and the narrower conceptions of logical theory. I shall discuss the locus of the function of thought, so far as such locus enables us to select and characterize some of the most fundamental distinctions, or divisions of labor, within the reflective process. In taking up the problem of the subject-matter of thought, I shall try to make clear that it assumes three quite distinct forms according to the epochal moment reached in transformation of experience; and that continual confusion and inconsistency are introduced when these respective meanings are not identified and described according to their respective geneses and places. I shall attempt to show that we must consider subject-matter from the standpoint, first, of the antecedents or conditions that evoke thought; second, of the datum or immediate material presented to thought; and, third, of the proper content of thought. Of these three distinctions the first, that of antecedent and stimulus, clearly refers to the situation that is immediately prior to the thought-function as such. The second, that of datum or immediately given matter, refers to a distinction which is made within the thought-process as a part of and for the sake of its own modus operandi. It is a status in the scheme of thinking. The third, that of content or object, refers to the progress actually made in any thought-function; the material which is organized into the thought-situation, so far as this has fulfilled its purpose. It goes without saying that these are to be discriminated as stages of a life-process in the natural history of experience, not as ready-made or ontological; it is contended that, save as they are differentiated in connection with well-defined historical stages, they are either lumped off as equivalents, or else treated as absolute divisions—or as each by turns, according to the exigencies of the particular argument. In fact, this chapter will get at the matter of preliminary conditions of thought indirectly rather than directly, by indicating the contradictory positions into which one of the most vigorous and acute of modern logicians, Lotze, has been forced through failing to define logical distinctions in terms of the history of readjustment of experience, and therefore endeavoring to interpret certain notions as absolute instead of as periodic and methodological.
Before passing directly to the exposition and criticism of Lotze, it will be well, however, to take the matter in a somewhat freer way. We cannot approach logical inquiry in a wholly direct and uncompromised manner. Of necessity we bring to it certain distinctions—distinctions partly the outcome of concrete experience; partly due to the logical theory which has got embodied in ordinary language and in current intellectual habits; partly results of deliberate scientific and philosophic inquiry. These more or less ready-made results are resources; they are the only weapons with which we can attack the new problem. Yet they are full of unexamined assumptions; they commit us to all sorts of logically predetermined conclusions. In one sense our study of the new subject-matter, let us say logical theory, is in truth only a review, a re-testing and criticising of the intellectual standpoints and methods which we bring with us to the study.
Everyone comes with certain distinctions already made between the subjective and the objective, between the physical and the psychical, between the intellectual and the factual. (1) We have learned to regard the region of emotional disturbance, of uncertainty and aspiration, as belonging somehow peculiarly to ourselves; we have learned to set over against this a world of observation and of valid thought as something unaffected by our moods, hopes, fears, and opinions. (2) We have also come to distinguish between what is immediately present in our experience and the past and the future; we contrast the realms of memory and anticipation of sense-perception; the given with the ideal. (3) We are confirmed in a habit of distinguishing between what we call actual fact and our mental attitude toward that fact—the attitude of surmise or wonder or reflective investigation. While one of the aims of logical theory is precisely to make us critically conscious of the significance and bearing of these various distinctions, to change them from ready-made assumptions into controlled constructs, our mental habits are so set that they tend to have their own way with us; and we read into logical theory conceptions that were formed before we had even dreamed of the logical undertaking which after all has for its business to assign to the terms in question their proper meaning.
We find in Lotze an unusually explicit inventory of these various preliminary distinctions; and an unusually serious effort to deal with the problems which arise from introducing them into the structure of logical theory. (1) He expressly separates the matter of logical worth from that of psychological genesis. He consequently abstracts the subject-matter of logic as such wholly from the question of historic locus and situs. (2) He agrees with common-sense in holding that logical thought is reflective and thus presupposes a given material. He occupies himself with the nature of the antecedent conditions. (3) He wrestles with the problem of how a material formed prior to thought and irrespective of it can yet afford it stuff upon which to exercise itself. (4) He expressly raises the question of how thought working independently and from without upon a foreign material can shape the latter into results which are valid—that is, objective.
If his discussion is successful; if Lotze can provide the intermediaries which span the gulf between an independent thought-material and an independent thought-activity; if he can show that the question of the origin of thought-material and of thought-activity is irrelevant to the question of its worth, we shall have to surrender the position already taken. But if we find that Lotze's elaborations only elaborate the same fundamental difficulty, presenting it now in this light and now in that, but never effecting more than presenting the problem as if it were its own solution, we shall be confirmed in our idea of the need of considering logical questions from a different point of view. If we find that, whatever his formal treatment, he always, as matter of fact, falls back upon some organized situation or function as the source of both the specific thought-material and the specific thought-activity in correspondence with each other, we shall have in so far an elucidation and even a corroboration of our theory.
1. We begin with the question of the material antecedents of thought—antecedents which condition reflection, and which call it out as reaction or response, by giving it its cue. Lotze differs from many logicians of the same type in affording us an explicit account of these antecedents. The ultimate material antecedents of thought are found in impressions, which are due to external objects as stimuli. Taken in themselves, these impressions are mere psychical states or events. They exist in us side by side, or one after the other, according as the objects which excite them operate simultaneously or successively. The occurrence of these various psychical states is not, however, entirely dependent upon the presence of the exciting thing. After a state has once been excited, it gets the power of reawakening other states which have accompanied it or followed it. The associative mechanism of revival plays a part. If we had a complete knowledge of both the stimulating object and its effects, and of the details of the associative mechanism, we should be able from given data to predict the whole course of any given train or current of ideas (for the impressions as conjoined simultaneously or successively become ideas and a current of ideas).
Taken in itself, a sensation or impression is nothing but a "state of our consciousness, a mood of ourselves." Any given current of ideas is a necessary sequence of existences (just as necessary as any succession of material events), happening in some particular sensitive soul or organism. "Just because, under their respective conditions, every such series of ideas hangs together by the same necessity and law as every other, there would be no ground for making any such distinction of value as that between truth and untruth, thus placing one group in opposition to all the others."5
2. Thus far, as the last quotation clearly indicates, there is no question of reflective thought, and hence no question of logical theory. But
